November 2016

The emergence of Jeffrey A. Eisenach, a long-time Washington telecommunications policy insider and economist who favors free markets, as head of President-elect Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission transition team — and as a leading candidate for the agency’s chairmanship — has raised broadcast industry hopes that the agency will shift onto a more deregulatory course.

Eisenach, 58, is well known in communications policy circles. He has served as a consultant to the National Association of Broadcasters and the Walt Disney Co., writing detailed economic reports supporting their positions on the incentive auction, retransmission consent and ownership deregulation. Eisenach has also been called in by NCTA–The Internet & Television Association on telephone issues, said Brian Dietz, an NCTA spokesman. “Over the past several years, NCTA occasionally engaged Jeffrey Eisenach’s firm for economic studies on different policy issues. He has deep experience on technology policy and competition issues and we’ve always welcomed his thoughts and analysis.” NAB President Gordon Smith calls him a "smart choice" for the Trump transition.

In retrospect, President Barack Obama wasn’t the first high-tech president just because he had a personal relationship with technology. He was also the president who oversaw Silicon Valley’s reincarnation, from industrial accessory of the PC and E-commerce era to information sovereign in the age of iPhone and Facebook. The Obama Administration mostly supported the tech sector, implicitly or explicitly, and for worse as much as better.

Now that President-elect Donald Trump is heading to the White House, things are likely to change. And Silicon Valley is worried. In July, a hundred tech-industry business leaders condemned President-elect Trump publicly, largely on social justice grounds. After his election, fear of a Trump presidency sent the tech industry into a tailspin. A prominent investor called for California to secede from the union. But once the dust clears, Trump might prove eminently compatible with Silicon Valley’s ongoing project. And if that’s the case, the technology industry’s mask of affable, harmless progressivism is about to be pulled off forever.

Rep Mike Pompeo (R-KS), the man that President-elect Donald Trump chose to lead the CIA when he becomes president, has long been a vocal supporter of expanding the government’s surveillance powers. As Congress worked to wind down the National Security Agency’s bulk data-collection program in the summer of 2016, rolling back one of the secret measures first authorized under President George W. Bush, Rep Pompeo, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, was pushing back.

In an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal this January, Rep Pompeo argued forcefully against “blunting” the government’s surveillance powers and called for “a fundamental upgrade to America’s surveillance capabilities.” In the piece, he laid out a road map for expanding surveillance. "Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database. Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed. That includes Presidential Policy Directive-28, which bestows privacy rights on foreigners and imposes burdensome requirements to justify data collection,"he wrote. In a break with other national-security hawks, however, Rep Pompeo wrote that mandating backdoors that would allow the government to access encrypted communications would “do little good.” He argued, as most technologists who promote encryption do, that weakening digital security in the United States would just push bad actors to switch to foreign-made or homegrown software.