CQ WEEKLY
April 9, 2013 – 9:41 a.m.

Technology: Linda Bloss-Baum

Onetime House Energy and Commerce Committee counsel Linda Bloss-Baum has set up her own business, a policy consulting firm called Linda Bloss-Baum Creative Strategies. Since 2011, she had been a vice president for public policy at Time Warner Inc.


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Bloss-Baum
 

Bloss-Baum lobbied for Warner Music Group, a record company owned by Time Warner, until it was spun off in 2004. She says that at the time she learned that the artistic community could be more vocal on policy issues, and her firm is an effort to address that need.

“Both the tech communities and the content communities recognize that we can fight all we want to about technology and how content will be distributed digitally,” she says, “but what everybody still will always love and be willing to pay for is the actual art.”

Bloss-Baum, 44, was a counsel for two Republicans who chaired Energy and Commerce between 1999 and 2003, Thomas J. Bliley Jr. of Virginia and Billy Tauzin of Louisiana. After leaving Capitol Hill in 2003, she lobbied for Universal Studios Entertainment before joining Warner Music Group.

She got her start in Washington as a manager for public policy at the Business Software Alliance.

Angela Giancarlo

The former chief of staff and senior legal adviser to Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell has joined the law firm Mayer Brown. Angela Giancarlo, who worked for McDowell, a Republican, from 2006, when he was confirmed, until this February, is a partner in Mayer Brown’s government and global trade practice.

McDowell announced his resignation from the FCC last month, but Giancarlo says she decided last year to leave the commission staff. Congress authorized the FCC to auction off wireless spectrum as part of a 2012 package extending payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits, and Giancarlo wants to help a variety of clients as the agency prepares to implement that sale.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski wants to start the auctions in 2014, but Giancarlo says the timeline is too aggressive because the agency still has to write rules for the process. Her job, says Giancarlo, will be “helping to present strategic advice when it comes to the devising of positions and trying to advocate the positions” before the commission.