US President Joe Biden has proposed Jessica Rosenworcel as chair of the Federal Communications Commission. He also nominated Gigi Sohn to take the empty fifth seat on the FCC, ending the 2-2 deadlock on the commission.
In addition, Biden proposed Alan Davidson as Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, in the Department of Commerce, and Kathi Vidal as Under Secretary for Intellectual Property and Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office in the same department.
Rosenworcel has served as acting chair of the FCC since the start of the year when Biden took office, and has been a member of the commission since 2012. If confirmed by the Senate, she will be the first woman permanent chair of the regulator.
Sohn is a former counsellor to FCC chair Tom Wheeler (2013-16) and prior to that helped found and lead the public interest group Public Knowledge for over 10 years. She currently is a Distinguished Fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy and a "leading public advocate for open, affordable, and democratic communications networks", the White House said in a statement. She was previously a Project Specialist in the Ford Foundation’s Media, Arts and Culture unit and Executive Director of the Media Access Project, a communications public interest law firm.
Davidson is an internet policy expert currently serving as senior advisor at the Mozilla Foundation. He was previously Mozilla’s Vice President of Global Policy, Trust and Security, where he led public policy and privacy teams. Davidson previously served in the Obama-Biden Administration as the first Director of Digital Economy at the US Department of Commerce and before that started Google’s public policy office in Washington, DC, leading government relations and policy for seven years until 2012.
