Comcast is on a hiring roll.
Starting next Monday, telecom policy veteran Rebecca Arbogast, a managing director of media and telecom equity research at the investment banking firm of Stifel Nicolaus, will be Comcast’s new vice president of global public policy.
She’ll be joining Kyle McSlarrow, who joined Comcast this April from the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, where he was president and CEO, and Meredith Atwell Baker, who left the Federal Communications Commission when her term as a commissioner expired at the end of June.
McSlarrow’s title is President of Comcast/NBCUniversal for Washington, D.C, while Atwell Baker’s is senior vice president of government affairs.
Arbogast will certainly have her work cut out for her, as her responsibility will be to co-ordinate all of the public policy issues facing the merged Comcast/NBCUniversal unit.
Among the many issues that she’ll have to triangulate on are net neutrality, copyright enforcement issues, retransmission consent issues with broadcasters and cybersecurity.
Retransmission consent refers to the business deals struck with broadcasters over the terms on which cable companies carry broadcast television programming.
Arbogast, a former chief of the FCC’s international telecommunications bureau, became well known for her telecom and media research notes fired off from her desk at Stifel Nicolaus, which she’s been with since 2005.
Although House Republicans and other telecommunications companies have railed against the FCC’s net neutrality rules, Arbogast has told the New York Times in her capacity as a research analyst that the FCC’s rules are “by definition a compromise.” In other research notes, she’s said that the finalization of the rules are by no means the end of the conversation about the subject in Washington DC.
Arbogast has also shown that she has a big picture approach to how she sees the internet developing. In a research note sent out in December about the fallout of Wikileaks and its release of State Department cables, she noted:
“Depending on how this all unfolds, it will likely play a role in any subsequent debates over domestic and global Internet governance and regulation, triggering a more complicated set of factors and relationships among Internet players that need to be considered.”
As the nation’s largest broadband provider, Comcast will certainly have a role to play in the debate. TPM’s Idea Lab will be tracking it.
