Act Two for FCC's Meredith Attwell Baker

Meredith Attwell Baker may be a junior member of the Federal Communications Commission, but she's no stranger to technology policy debates. As the Bush administration's point person on telecommunications policy at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, she headed a $1.5 billion program to help consumers with the transition to digital television. The program was not well received by some lawmakers and public interest groups. They felt the program's centerpiece, an initiative to hand out coupons to defray some of the cost of new digital conversion gear, lacked sufficient funding and left some analog television viewers in the lurch. "You had an administration that for a number of reasons didn't feel accountable to the success of the coupon program," said Joel Kelsey, a policy analyst for Consumer Union. "But we very much valued the work that Assistant Secretary Baker did to save the boat from sinking." Now, Baker has received a second chance of sorts, again in one of the federal government's most powerful positions in technology policy. She was picked by President Obama as the minority party's representative on the FCC. And she is staking a claim in another controversial debate: over the use of radio spectrum for mobile broadband.