Trail of tweets haunts President Biden’s FCC and FTC nominees

Republican senators are alleging that the Twitter histories of Federal Communications Commission nominee Gigi Sohn [Senior Fellow and Public Advocate at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society] and Federal Trade Commission nominee Alvaro Bedoya, which include jabs at Fox News and ICE, show they are too biased to lead the independent agencies that oversee important tech and telecom issues. Unified GOP opposition to these two nominees would have a big impact, because both are needed to cement Democratic majorities at their respective agencies, now deadlocked along partisan lines. Without them, progressives cannot move ahead with priorities on issues such as net neutrality, competition and privacy. And while Democrats could still push the nominations through, that would require their entire caucus to stick together. But with other legislative priorities in the Senate, the opposition could delay Sohn’s and Bedoya’s confirmations until 2022. The timing matters because it took Biden so many months to name nominees to key tech positions. “Most of the big-ticket items” the FCC would act on “take about a year to process through,” said Ernesto Falcon, senior legislative counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a tech civil liberties group that supports the nominees. (Sohn is an EFF board member.)