Austin Schlick, FCC general counsel who exited
the commission in mid-June, has landed at Google as part of the company's Washington legal team, Google
confirmed Thursday.
Schlick
joined the FCC in July 2009 and presided over the FCC's defense of its
indecency regs, its regulatory authority for its network openness rules, and
its decision to loosen newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership regs. He had been
chief of litigation for the State of Maryland before that.
Google
faces possible FTC action in the wake of an investigation into its search and
advertising business, and is under pressure from European regulators to be more
transparent about it protects user privacy.
The
Genachowski-to-Web move is not a new one. Colin Crowell, senior counselor to
the chairman until his exit in 2010, wound up as head of global public policy
for Twitter. Genachowski comes to his own broadband-centricity honestly. Before
he was FCC chairman, he was chief of business operations for
IAC/InterActiveCorp., Barry Diller's aggregation of Web companies that includes about.com, ask.com, match.com, and Newsweek's Daily Beast.
