The Senate will vote on the nominations of Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission and Alvaro Bedoya to the Federal Trade Commission, respectively. The Senate Commerce Committee moved ahead their nominations, although the 14-14 tie means there will likely be an extra procedural step for every earlier than a full Senate vote.
Democrats and Republicans every have 50 senators although Vice President Kamala Harris has a tie-breaker vote. Should Sohn and Bedoya be confirmed as commissioners, the Democrats will maintain a majority in each the FCC and FTC.
The committee delayed a vote on the nominations after Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) suffered a stroke in January. Luján, whose vote was wanted for Democrats to maneuver the nominations ahead, has since returned to work.
President Biden nominated Sohn on the similar time he put ahead Jessica Rosenworcel as FCC chair in October. While the Senate accredited Rosenworcel’s everlasting appointment in December, Sohn’s appointment has taken longer. As such, the FCC has been deadlocked at 2-2 alongside occasion strains, leaving Rosenworcel unable to, amongst different issues, advance a web neutrality coverage.
Opposition to the nomination of Sohn, a longtime advocate for web neutrality, has come from various quarters, together with the Directors Guild of America. The group urged senators to vote down Sohn’s nomination because of her “hostility in direction of copyright legislation.” Sohn was beforehand on the board of Locast, a defunct service that rebroadcast over-the-air TV broadcast alerts through the web. She mentioned she’d recuse herself from points regarding retransmission consent and broadcast copyright.
In affirmation hearings, Republicans portrayed Sohn as an excessive partisan. She hit again at these assertions, arguing that she had been topic to “unrelenting, unfair and outright false criticism and scrutiny.”
The FTC, in the meantime, is within the means of reviewing some important proposed mergers. According to studies, these embrace Amazon’s deliberate buyout of MGM and Microsoft’s bid to amass Activision Blizzard. Reports counsel the FTC is mulling an antitrust problem to dam the Amazon-MGM deal, although it might want a majority vote to proceed with a lawsuit.