FCC Boss Tom Wheeler Resigns, Signals Beginning Of End For Net Neutrality

With a Trump presidency looming, and the dismantling of net neutrality a seeming inevitability Tom Wheeler, the boss of the FCC and long time defender of net neutrality recently announced his resignation.

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Guest post by Karl Bode of Techdirt

We've been discussing how FCC Boss Tom Wheeler was stuck between a rock and a hard place with a Trump Presidency looming. While Wheeler's tenure at the FCC doesn't officially end until 2018, under FCC rules he can only stay on as a vanilla Commissioner — not the agency boss. With the incoming Trump administration and GOP making it very clear they want to gut net neutrality and defang and defund the FCC, Wheeler sticking around would have resulted in a 2-2 partisan deadlock keeping the FCC in a holding pattern — at least until a new FCC boss is chosen and approved.

But even then, it was only a matter of time before Wheeler found himself stuck in a 3-2 minority, spending a chunk of his retirement years watching as a slow series of 3-2 partisan votes dismantled many of the efforts Wheeler has worked on during his tenure (most notably net neutrality rules, Title II reclassification, and new