Former FCC General Counsel Joins Google

Will be part of company's Washington legal team

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 10/25/2012 8:35:40 PM

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.