Why Blind Americans Are Worried About Trump’s Tech Policy

Every month, the Federal Communications Commission holds an open meeting, a public event at which the agency’s five commissioners vote on whether to adopt new regulations and act on particular agenda items. The meetings typically fill their scheduled two-hour time slots, but the most recent one, which took place on November 17th, lasted all of nine minutes. (Commissioner Mignon Clyburn spent several of those minutes thanking the fall interns and tearfully eulogizing the journalist Gwen Ifill.) In the press conference that immediately followed, Tom Wheeler, the Democratic chairman of the F.C.C., explained the reason for the curtailed agenda: congressional Republicans, led by Senator Jim Thune, had asked him and his colleagues to shelve anything “complex, partisan, or otherwise controversial” until after Donald Trump’s inauguration as President in January. Such requests, according to Amina Fazlullah, the director of policy at the Benton Foundation, a public-interest nonprofit, are “one hundred per cent normal.” She noted that, in late 2008, Democratic leaders demanded the same of George W. Bush’s F.C.C. head. “It doesn’t make a ton of sense to work on an item that you know the incoming Administration will then work to undo,” Fazlullah told me.