Updated 12 a.m. Aug. 30
Twitter announced on Monday — via a Tweet — that it has hired Colin Crowell, a former top advisor to Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski, and a long-time Democratic staffer on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as its new top in-house lobbyist in DC.
Twitter’s General Counsel Alex MacGillivray disclosed the hire on Twitter Monday morning, where he welcomed Crowell as the company’s new global head of public policy. Crowell tweeted that he’ll start mid-September.
Crowell will be Twitter’s first public policy point man in Washington, D.C. Twitter hired Adam Sharp in D.C. last November, but he’s more of a liaison person who helps politicos and government figures learn how to use Twitter as part of their public communications than a policy person.
Though the world of social media may be relatively new to Crowell, he’s a 20-year veteran of the world of telecommunications law and policymaking, and a strong advocate of net neutrality and universal access to high-speed internet networks.
Most recently, he worked for a brief stint as a consultant after leaving the FCC just over a year ago as senior advisor to Genachowski, where he worked on the National Broadband Plan and the FCC’s controversial net neutrality rules, which are designed to prevent network operators from arbitrarily discriminating against applications providers on their networks.
Crowell was a top staffer for Rep. Ed Markey, (D-MA) the former chairman of the House telecommunications subcommittee, where he helped write the landmark Telecom Act of 1996 that deregulated the telecommunications industry.
More recently, according to a Washington Post profile, Crowell helped Markey write his doomed net neutrality bill.
“In terms of experience, from the beginning he was really there present at the creation of the internet, and digital television, and the modern wireless industry, and all kinds of other things, so he’s seen a pattern emerge in all of these things, and he has the best historical recollection of anybody I know of what occurred at various points in time,” said Blair Levin, the Aspen Institute’s communications and society fellow in an interview with TPM Monday.
Levin was referring to many of the telecom policies that were created in the Nineties that shaped the evolution of the communications infrastructure that we have today.
Levin has worked closely with Crowell during his 20-year tenure on Capitol Hill, and at the FCC, first when Levin was chief of staff for former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, and subsequently much more recently when both were involved in creating and implementing President Obama’s National Broadband Plan.
“I think he is also very widely respected on the Republican side, in part just because of his personality and character, and in part because he has an ability to argue policy without getting personal, and he’s always very understanding of the other side’s point of view.” Levin said. “I don’t see [Twitter] needing to build up a huge operation in the way that telephone companies do, but I do think they need someone who has the ability to act in a number of different realms and see the connection between those realms — and for that kind of thing I really couldn’t think of anyone better than Colin.”
One of the first issues that Crowell will have to manage for Twitter in D.C. is not on the telecom front, however. It’s on the competitive front — the Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Twitter has acted anticompetitively against software developers building businesses around Twitter’s platform.
Crowell did not immediately respond for a request for comment about his new job at the time we published this post.
