Ask HN: Why do lawyers run the FCC?
I just learned that all FCC commissioners are lawyers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Communications_Commission#Commissioners_2
In addition to their law degrees, 4 have B.A. degrees and 1 has a B.M. degree. I imagine if you asked them basic networking questions (e.g. how do you determine the maximum transfer speed between two points in a network based on diagrams showing the transfer rates of all network segments), they would have no idea how to answer them, yet you would think people appointed to make regulatory decisions would be required to understand the thing they are regulating. It is plainly obvious that they do not understand these things given the recent “coffee” analogy. It is also obvious to me that even the ones who do not back the “coffee” analogy have no idea what they are doing given that any engineer should have considered data transfer caps to be a top issue, yet they are only getting to it now, even though the current FCC chair has been with the FCC since before data transfer caps existed. That brings me to my question:
Why are lawyers and not engineers running an agency that regulates telecommunications? Also, why does nobody talk about this?
Agency regulations are written in legalese, and lawyers speak legalese natively.