Things the FCC thinks it knows

[Commentary] One of the questions about current Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ton Wheeler is where he falls on the awareness-of-his-limitations spectrum.

Chairman Wheeler has long and extensive backgrounds as a lobbyist for the cable TV and cellular network industries, but lobbyists are not technologists. He also has an avid interest in history, but historians aren’t technologists either. Wheeler’s recent speeches contain a number of puzzling statements on spectrum policy: he has taken to praising the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology report on spectrum “sharing” and a recent spectrum interference report by the Silicon Flatirons Center, both of which are shockingly light on specifics. It’s not so much that either report is wrong as that neither is detailed enough to be judged right or wrong.

[Bennett is a visiting fellow at AEI]