If you didn't immediately query, "Who is President Obama's pick to run the Federal Communications Commission?" don't feel bad. In contrast to other high-profile picks, Genachowski got about as much attention as that obscure, eye-glazing topic, Internet neutrality.
Yes, maybe you vaguely recall those commercials a couple of years back - with both sides direly predicting the future of the Internet was at stake. Still, this is a battle being waged off most people's radar.
But if you haven't heard of Genachowski - or Internet neutrality, for that matter - don't worry, you will. And partisans on both sides of this byzantine issue will no doubt do their best to cloud the issue.
A classmate of the president's since Harvard, Genachowski worked for the FCC under President Clinton and clerked for Supreme Court justices William Brennan and David Souter. He was a senior executive at IAC/Interactive Corp., a major Internet company. And he's credited with writing the president's technology platform - one that strongly supports Internet neutrality.
On the surface, net neutrality sounds benign enough - all Interent traffic should be treated equally, regardless of content or platform. But at its heart neutrality comes down to a more commercial question: Should telephone and cable companies be allowed to charge extra fees for some content and downloads, creating tiered levels of service? For example, downloading pictures takes more bandwidth than, say, checking e-mail. Shouldn't it cost more, too?
The neutrality camp - which, unsurprisingly includes such Internet giants as Google and Microsoft - says no. They warn that if AT&T and other infrastructure providers get their way, the Web will come to resemble cable TV, with ever costlier charges for premium content and service. Eventually, only the rich will be able to surf the Web as we know it today, with the rest of us being forced to settle for limited service and ever-lengthening transmission times.
The pro-neutrality folks also include a disparate bunch of political organizations who want to make sure their Internet messages remain widely available, from MoveOn.org to the Christian Coalition of America.
But the phone and cable companies, who want to be able to pass along the costs of new equipment upgrades to the big Internet companies - have their allies, too. They include a number of top Internet engineers who fear that. without the ability to fund new innovations through tiered pricing, the electronic superhighway could grind to a standstill.
And some conservative commentators fear all this talk of neutrality is just the beginning of a host of government content regulations that will eventually stifle First Amendment freedom online.
There are a few online bloggers I'd like to stifle myself, but you have to admit, that's scary stuff. The history of government regulation is often one of unintended consequences in even the best-intended regulatory schemes.
Besides, the other side wraps itself in free expression just as quickly. "Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say," Google argues, "broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online."
Some commentators have accused both sides of manufacturing this crisis. In an especially lucid analysis of the misleading rhetoric on both sides, Washington Post columnist Jeff Birnbaum observed, "consumers will pay the freight any way you look at it. That's Economics 101. They will either pay the telephone and cable companies via higher rates, or they will pay the online firms the same way."
The fact is, free markets dictate that those who can afford it will get better service, just as they do now. The people who can pay for laptops, wireless services, faster, more reliable service providers already enjoy far wider, more convenient access.
That will never change, just as regulation of the Internet is as inevitable as death and taxes. It doesn't make any more sense to talk about an information superhighway free of government interference than it does to talk about a highway network free of regulation. One way or another, government has to set the rules of the road.
The nation's biggest cable company, Comcast, is challenging a 3-2 pro-neutrality decision last year by the FCC, and the issue will have to be settled by the federal courts if not in Congress.
In addition, the new stimulus bill includes more than $7 billion for broadband access; nearly $5 billion will require recipients to practice Internet-neutral principles.
"If Congress or the (Federal Communications Commission) moves forward to aggressively regulate the Internet, Net neutrality advocates will soon confront some of my guitar-toting, NASCAR-loving songwriters ready to come to D.C.," promises Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Nashville.
This fight promises to get interesting, after all.
And that's a good thing, because we've only begun to grapple with the political questions raised by this technological revolution.
Will the Web continue to be a place of "common carriers," like phone companies, which can't discriminate or regulate content? Will it come to look like broadcast media, increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few information providers who decide what you can see and how much you'll pay for it?
No doubt the forces of innovation and enterprise will take us in directions we don't foresee. But government intervention - of one kind or another - will shape that future, too.
So keep an eye on Julius Genachowski. He's likely to be more important than the final answer on some trivia show.
