The FCC’s next CTO is a network neutrality expert

University of California at Irvine Professor Scott Jordan is the Federal Communications Commission’s new chief technology officer. What’s particularly interesting in this case is that Jordan's engineering and technical expertise is a near-perfect overlap with many of the most complicated, most contentious issues facing the FCC today.

In announcing Jordan, the FCC highlight his work on "communications platforms, pricing, and differentiated services on the Internet," as well as the integration of "voice, data, and video on the Internet and on wireless networks." In short, much of the makings of the modern Internet. And while it's generally dangerous to parse an academic's publishing record to deduce how he or she might make public policy, Jordan has done us the favor of actually filing comments with the FCC the last time the commission considered rulemaking on the open Internet question. It's a nuanced take, distilled in Jordan and a co-author's statements that "neither the extreme pro nor con net neutrality positions are consistent with the philosophy of Internet architecture" and "the net neutrality issue is the result of a fragmented communications policy unable to deal with technology convergence."