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With Perspective From Both Sides of His Desk, F.C.C. Chairman Ponders Net Neutrality

Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.Credit...Mark Holm for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — As a lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries, Tom Wheeler played a role in shaping almost every major telecommunications policy and innovation over the last three decades.

Cable and telephone deregulation. Internet service in schools and libraries. C-SPAN.

None of them, though, have generated as much public interest as net neutrality, the policy most likely to define his time as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

In the last few months, Mr. Wheeler’s guidelines for net neutrality, the concept that users should have equal access to any legal online content, have become a lightning rod for criticism. More than 3.7 million comments about the policy have flowed to the commission. Many of them argue that Mr. Wheeler’s plan does not go far enough to protect an open Internet.

Underlying much of the criticism has been Mr. Wheeler’s long history as a lobbyist or investor in companies he now regulates. But almost a year into the job, Mr. Wheeler has established a record as a formidable opponent to the industries he used to represent.

This year, he joined the Justice Department’s antitrust division in opposing the proposed merger of Sprint and T-Mobile, the third- and fourth-largest cellphone companies. That opposition led Sprint’s parent, SoftBank, to abandon the deal. This month, he strongly hinted that mobile broadband would likely to be subject to the same rules as wired broadband, a change from his initial proposal.

“Sitting on the other side of the desk in this office is really a fascinating experience,” Mr. Wheeler, 68, said in an interview last week. As a lobbyist, he said, “I used to come into this office, and I was cocksure. ‘This is the answer; what’s important is what’s needed for my client.’ But as I’ve said many times, I have an entirely different client now.”

Six-foot-four and rail thin, Mr. Wheeler still looks like a lobbyist out of central casting. He stands so tall he practically leans backward. His crisp shirts are often monogrammed and have French cuffs.

After growing up in Columbus, Ohio, and graduating from Ohio State University, he worked on the 1968 Senate campaign for John J. Gilligan in Ohio. The campaign, though a losing effort, gave him “Potomac fever,” Mr. Wheeler said. He moved to Washington and joined the Grocery Manufacturers Association, where he stayed for several years before moving to the upstart cable industry.

While at the leading cable industry group, then known as the National Cable Television Association, he helped shepherd the 1984 Cable Act, which largely deregulated the still-fledgling business. While at the top wireless association, he pushed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, a sweeping update of the 1934 Communications Act. He helped get the cable industry behind the creation of C-SPAN, and he championed the E-Rate program, which provided funding for advanced telecommunications connections for schools and libraries.

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The future of protecting an open Internet has been the subject of fierce debate, and potential changes to the rules by the Federal Communications Commission could affect your online experience.

Reed Hundt, who was F.C.C. chairman in 1994, when an earlier version of the Telecommunications Act died in Congress, said Mr. Wheeler pushed the F.C.C. to continue to fight to get E-Rate approved, even though it would not directly benefit the cellular industry.

“He was the only person in the entire business world who came to me and said, ‘Don’t give up on E-Rate,’ ” Mr. Hundt said.

Over the years Mr. Wheeler regularly supported Democratic candidates, and as he increased his wealth as a venture capitalist, his fund-raising efforts expanded as well.

In the fall of 2007, he and his wife, Carol, moved to Ames, Iowa, her hometown, to campaign for President Obama before the Iowa caucuses. For six weeks, the Wheelers rubbed shoulders with campaign workers in their 20s, answering phones each weeknight and knocking on doors all weekend.

Later, he became a top fund-raiser for Mr. Obama’s campaign, raising more than $700,000.

His work as an investor in communications start-ups helped make him personally wealthy, too. On financial disclosure forms he lists at least $10 million in financial assets, much of them investments in media companies. After his nomination last year, he divested himself of investments in 78 media companies, including Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and Google.

Some of Mr. Wheeler’s supporters say his wealth has freed him as chairman because he does not need a job when he is done. Many past commissioners have turned to lobbying after their tenure — including the current leaders of the cable and wireless associations: Michael K. Powell, chief of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association and former F.C.C. chairman; and Meredith Attwell Baker, the chief of CTIA-The Wireless Association and a former F.C.C. commissioner. Mr. Wheeler has said he wanted to return to writing books.

But many consumer organizations say Mr. Wheeler could have taken a stronger stand against cable groups.

“So far, the discussion has not been as productive as we would have liked,” said Matt Wood, policy director at Free Press, a consumer interest group. “The rhetoric has been good, but the reality of the proposal hasn’t matched that.”

One thing has remained constant throughout the years, according to people who have known Mr. Wheeler for a long time — his belief that for every issue, there is a right and a wrong answer.

Mr. Wheeler says he relishes debate, up to a point.

“I love the intellectual stimulation of conflicting ideas,” he said. “A lot of people tend to say, ‘He didn’t do it my way, therefore he doesn’t have an open mind, and therefore he’s not willing to compromise.’ I think there is a difference between compromise and capitulation.”

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Mr. Wheeler at an event hosted by the New Mexico Media Literacy Project in June.Credit...Mark Holm for The New York Times

Mr. Wheeler sometimes references his past when explaining his policy decisions. After leaving the cable association in 1984, he helped start a company that delivered high-speed data to home computers over cable television lines. It ran up against a cable industry that wanted the company, Nabu, to pay for the right to access the cable lines, money that the start-up did not have.

“I had companies fail because they did not have access to networks,” he said at a town-hall meeting in Albuquerque in June, during a discussion about whether his net neutrality plan was strong enough. “Cable companies would tell us to go away. I know what it’s like to not have access.”

Arthur Esch, who started Nabu with Mr. Wheeler when relatively few people had heard the word “online,” said Mr. Wheeler was always open to hearing people’s ideas and their thought process.

But listening is often as far as it goes.

“He’s not a democracy guy,” Mr. Esch said. “You do not have a vote. He’s a decision maker.”

Mr. Wheeler’s style has led to some grumbling among the commissioners at F.C.C. headquarters. Aides say the other commissioners often are excluded from the drafting of new proposals.

Sometimes, that has meant making enemies with groups that once were friends — especially when it comes to net neutrality.

Mr. Wheeler was handed the issue of net neutrality two months into his tenure, when a federal appeals court threw out F.C.C. rules enacted in 2010 that forbade broadband providers from blocking or discriminating against any legal content. The court said the F.C.C. was treating broadband companies too much like regulated utilities.

Those invalidated rules also discouraged content providers from paying for priority access through a broadband company’s pipes. But when Mr. Wheeler released a new set of rules, that provision was missing, leading many critics to say that the new regime violated net neutrality by allowing for paid prioritization — so-called fast lanes through a broadband company’s systems.

New rules are expected to be adopted by the end of the year. Mr. Wheeler has said several times that he does not believe fast lanes are consistent with an open Internet.

“How we deal with open Internet is going to have to be an amalgam of multiple approaches,” he said.

“These are new times. These are new technologies,” he continued. “There is a new future and we want to be able to structure something that will last into that new future.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Shaping the Internet and Seeing Both Sides. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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