Last week, the word going around town–and in the “Twittersphere”–was that Gene Kimmelman, the president of advocacy group Public Knowledge, was threatening that if FCC Commissioner Rosenworcel didn’t “get in line” behind Chairman Wheeler’s set-top box proposal that he would oppose her re-nomination for another term as an FCC Commissioner.  This article in Fortune supports the rumor with a quote from Kimmelman that “[w]e’ll hold everyone accountable . . .  [for not supporting the Chairman’s set-top box plan].”  If you’re anything like me, you’re probably asking, “who does this?”

Who Does This?

In communications circles, perhaps no group has been as successful at converting political capital into the old-fashioned kind as Public Knowledge.  After the group’s previous president, Gigi Sohn, became a senior adviser to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, Public Knowledge has carved out a lucrative niche for itself as a critical ally for commercial interests with regulatory goals, i.e., either seeking to escape scrutiny (e.g., Google), or to saddle their rivals with more regulation (e.g., Netflix and the CLECs).

The group’s current president, Gene Kimmelman, before taking over at Public Knowledge, was himself a political appointee for the first half of the Obama administration–as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice.  Kimmelman, as his Wikipedia page will tell you, “is a consumer protection advocate who specializes in competition law and United States antitrust law.”

If you’ve got the political power, I can kind of see–in a TV bad guy sort of way–why you might try to deliver a political threat to an FCC Commissioner; assuming you thought your victim believed you had the power to deliver on the threat, and the issue was so important to you that you didn’t mind looking like a cliché and a jerk at the same time.  But still, why tell the world?

It seems to me that, if you go public with your threat, you make it harder for your threat to work.  After all, the smaller the group of people that knows about your threat, the easier it is to give your target a “face-saving” way out.

Read the post on Jonathan Lee’s Telecom Sense blog