Julius Genachowski, telecoms and Internet expert

After Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign in 2008, he asked Julius Genachowski to take over the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the US telecommunications industry.

His stint at the FCC is widely regarded as a success. He is credited with transforming the organization to deal with 21st-century challenges. “We modernized it from an agency that had been focused on older communications technologies like broadcast television and we focused it on broadband,” he says. Among his initiatives was to produce a national broadband plan, an endeavor that he sees as crucial for any country hoping to take advantage of the explosion in smartphone and tablet use. The obstacles to expanding broadband access, though, were significant. Getting the legislation for the incentive auctions – planned to kick off next year – through a gridlocked Congress was in itself an achievement. “I worked as hard as I could to keep communications technology issues from becoming polarized and partisan, although polarization in the US does affect everything,” he says. “But the other advantage to the idea that we crafted was that it produced revenue for the US Treasury.” During his tenure, the US also pulled far ahead of Europe in terms of the implementation of 4G. But the success that possibly gained the most attention was his record on “net neutrality” – the principle that internet service providers should not give their own content preferential treatment.