I am still in a state of shock over Tom Wheeler's comments over at Wired. It looks like he's going to recommend essentially what we all thought was impossible: Title II regulations for broadband providers, including mobile broadband providers!

At first blush, the situation seems dire. Tom Wheeler was a top cable industry lobbyist before he took the position of chairman of the FCC. It doesn't take a lot of explaining for anyone to see that this is a pretty clear conflict of interest. It's as insane as Dick Cheney having to quit his job as CEO of Halliburton in order to become the Vice President of the United States. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the next eight years were full of absurd government spending on no-bid contracts given to -- naturally -- Halliburton. So it seemed the future of the internet would be like a Comedy Central show whose humor is based solely on schadenfreude.

However... Something happened. I'm intensely curious about the reason Chairman Wheeler decided to bring Title II to broadband. Because whatever it is, it's miraculous. He's almost certainly slammed the revolving door shut on himself. He's single-handedly responsible for recommending Title II for broadband providers, and for him to include mobile providers (i.e. cellphone network providers) as covered under Title II regulations is a huge blow to the zero-ethics, sociopath entities like Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and Verizon, who fight so hard to screw consumers for whatever profit they can manage.

It almost seems too good to be true. We aren't given too many things in our lifetime that are "too good to be true". I'm still cautious and thinking about what this could mean. I want to take it at face value and rejoice in what seems to be profound evidence that people in our government still care about protecting its citizen consumers. We'll just have to wait and see. We've still go to get this recommendation past the rest of the committee (which seems likely, despite there almost certainly being dissent among some members). The vote is February 26th. There are also some very smart net neutrality folks looking into the future at the possibility that Congressional Republicans will try to revoke the Telecommunications Act, thereby skirting the FCC as an entity with the power to create and enforce these kinds of regulation.

For the moment, however, the future looks bright.