• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, May 1, 2013

Tom Wheeler, who headed two industry trade organizations and gracefully wears the title “ultimate D.C. insider,” is widely reported to be President Barack Obama’s choice as the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The announcement is expected to come later today.

“Wheeler, managing director at Core Capital Partners LP in Washington, would succeed chairman Julius Genachowski, a Democrat who has pushed to expand access to high-speed Internet service, said a White House official who asked not to be named because the appointment hasn’t been announced,” report Bloomberg’s Todd Shields and Julianna Goldman.

“Chatter about Wheeler started inside D.C. circles almost immediately after Genachowski announced his intention to step down in March,” Joe Flint reports in the Los Angeles Times. “Last week, the industry publication Broadcasting & Cable reported that the White House was vetting Wheeler.”

Core Capital Partners is a D.C.-based firm with $350 million under management across two funds. It says it invests in early-stage ventures and small to mid-sized information technology, communications, digital media, and technology-enabled services companies that are “developing or incorporating disruptive, ‘core’ technologies in high-growth technology sectors.” 

Prior to his arrival at Core in 2005, Wheeler, 67, founded multiple companies offering cable, wireless and video communications services and was president of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) from 1979 to 1984 and CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) from 1992 to 2003. 

Across his three-decade career, according to his official bio, Wheeler “has been intimately involved in the development of the government’s telecommunications policy at both the legislative and regulatory level.”

Wheeler is “a longtime Obama loyalist” who with his wife, Carol, “worked the phones and knocked on doors” in Iowa during the president’s first campaign, Brooks Boliek and Tony Romm report on Politico. He has “also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars” for Obama campaign coffers and once told C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, “The six weeks that I spent in Iowa are going to rank right up there as the best six weeks of my life,” Boliek and Romm report.

Wheeler is “not only familiar with the telecommunications world but also with the startup world, which should please the tech community,” observes Venture Beat’s Tom Cheredar. “Personally, he sounds like a shoo-in for the position, but he’ll still need to gain a vote of approval from the Senate.”

Although there’s a conspiracy-theory-in-the-making over at Slate about an inability to locate Wheeler’s blog, we didn’t have the same difficulties (helpful hint: don’t leave out the “www”). The last post on Wheeler’s “Mobile Musings” dates to December 2012. It’s about the Syrian government’s shutdown of its Internet and mobile networks, concluding, “It is a heartening manifestation that as information pathways proliferate the flow of ideas and information cannot be constrained.”

Everybody nowadays is his or her own free press. Yay, ye unhuddled and untethered masses! 

Wheeler’s ties to some of the most powerful and deep-pocketed lobbying groups in Washington, however, are dismaying to some observers of the D.C. scene, Cecilia Kang points out in the Washington Post.

“I am skeptical that the former chief lobbyist of the wireless and cable industries will be capable of holding his former clients accountable for their ongoing shortcomings,” says Sascha Meinrath, head of the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation.

Free Press, which describes itself as a nonpartisan organization building a nationwide movement for media that serve the public interest, also finds Wheeler’s resume troubling. 

“"The Federal Communications Commission needs a strong leader -- someone who will use this powerful position to stand up to industry giants and protect the public interest. On paper, Tom Wheeler does not appear to be that person,” Free Press president and CEO Craig Aaron says in an emailed statement. But he later says Wheeler “now has the opportunity to prove his critics wrong, clean up the mess left by his predecessor, and be the public servant we so badly need at the FCC.”

And Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, emailed Reuters that “his past positions should be seen in light of the times and in the context of his other important experiences and engagement with policy.” Shields and Goldman write that Sohn “expects Wheeler to follow policies including open-Internet requirements and fostering competition among high-speed Internet services.”

In a January blog post carrying the wistful title “The Next FCC Chair: Decisive Protector of the Public Interest,” Sohn laid out the qualities she believed that the successor to Genachowski (who had not yet resigned) should possess in “presid[ing] over  matters such as the transition to all IP networks, finalizing the incentive auction and spectrum screen proceedings, figuring out how to promote broadband competition, and of course, how to reinstate the agency’s authority (and indeed its relevance) should it lose the legal challenge to the open Internet rules. This is in addition to whatever transactions the Commission may be asked to decide by industry.”

Sounds like a full day’s work with little time left over for blogging.