Ending a tenure that saw him at once a major friend of the Internet while a firm critic of broadcast obscenity, Michael Powell ended his last meeting as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission without a known successor, while choking back tears while saying he had loved every moment of his membership on the panel.
"Government service is not lucrative and it takes a painful toll on you personally and your family," Powell told his last FCC open meeting. "It saddens me when public officials and bureaucrats are criticized for having alternative motives or when someone personalizes disagreements."
Who will succeed him as FCC chairman is still open to speculation, with the most recent published reports on the subject suggesting two likely candidates, incumbent FCC commissioer Kevin Martin, like Powell a Republican, and assistant Commerce Department secretary for telecommunications Michael Gallagher.
Powell leaves the FCC officially next week, from which he will join the Aspen Institute as a senior fellow with its Communications and Society Program—the third time an outgoing FCC chairman has held that three-month fellowship. His longtime confidential assistant Judith Mann will join him there.
"Michael Powell exemplifies the type of leader that the Aspen Institute seeks to attract to our various program and leadership activities," said Aspen Institute president Walter Isaacson in a formal announcement. "He will add an important perspective to planning our non-partisan forums in communications and information policy -- and beyond."
On the one hand, the son of former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell just might be leaving a legacy as what fellow FCC commissioner Kathleen Abernathy called "the broadband guy," for his stance that competetion, especially in the broadband industry that was an infant when he joined the FCC, was best handled with multiple platforms handling bundled packages, rather than government-mandated prices to all competitors—a stance often upheld in court challenges.
On the other hand, Powell himself brushed aside legacy questions, saying those become moot as the issues change. "Three years from now," he told reporters after his final meeting, "there'll be some other hot topic. What you're really leaving behind is an institution that can endure and adapt, way more than the issue of the day."
Powell's FCC, however, also leaned hard enough on actual or alleged broadcast obscenity, particularly in such matters as Howard Stern and the Super Bowl halftime mishap involving Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" breast exposure during the live telecast. Those resulted in heavy FCC sanctions and helped, among other things, to provoke Stern's coming shift to satellite radio.
On the same day as his final FCC meeting, Powell gave the keynote at the Voice on the Net trade show, in which he cautioned Voice-over Internet Protocol providers against hubris. "You will not be a rock star forever," he told the gathering about the eager-beaver Internet telephony upstarts, cautioning in particular that they would need to work harder with regulators on improving emergency communications.
"Be prepared for that day and identify how things can turn south in a moment," he said. "You don't want to be on the front page of a newspaper because a house burns down, and a grandmother dies and it's because her VoIP service doesn't work."
