President-elect Donald Trump has added yet another deregulatory-minded associate of free market think tank the American Enterprise Institute to the FCC transition team.
The transition team announced that Roslyn Layton, a visiting fellow at AEI, would join Jeff Eisenach and Mark Jamison on the team providing input on new FCC leadership.
Eisenach is a visiting scholar and director of AEI's Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy. Layton is a visiting fellow at the center and Jamison has been a visiting fellow there as well, though he is no longer listed among their scholars.
Like the rest of the team, Layton is no fan of the FCC reclassification of ISPs as common carriers. She is also a foe of the FCC's broadband privacy rulemaking, calling it a "partisan endgame of corporate favoritism" resulting in "misinformed, unjustified rules."
She is a critic of the FCC setting aside spectrum in auctions at below-market rates for certain players, writing in a piece for Multichannel News in 2015 that was a way for the FCC to play favorites and ultimately raise broadband costs to consumers.
But she is a fan of zero rating plans,suggesting that disallowing them was being pushed by Google and others with "a vested interest in limiting these programs in order to maintain a stronghold on the key battleground of mobile advertising on smartphones, the fastest growing category of advertising."
On her website, Layton says she is "not a member of any political party," she doesn't own stock in any internet or telecom companies, and she makes her living "partly from a program in the Danish government [Aalborg University] and partly from Strand Consult."
The Trump transition team said she is not being paid for her FCC vetting work and identifies her employer as Aalborg University.
