The entertainment is the Chairman's speech which, like the President's speech, is supposed to be a humorous speech mocking the Chairman and the major players/issues (it is one of my professional milestones to have been mentioned on occassion). Like the Emperor of Barryar's Birthday from Bujold's Vorkosiverse, it has a set of customs and pracices with which the practitioner should be familiar and attendance is a chance to see and be seen by the fellow members of the telecom bar. Or, as I tell our younger staff who ask, it is worth doing at least once.
One interesting convention for the Twitter crowd. The suffix "-prom" has now come to mean an annual formal event for a class or group of people. Last night's event was marked with the hashtag #telecomprom. The White House Press Correspondent's Dinner is #nerdprom. The annual CES dinner for the consumer electronics crowd is #techprom. Not sure what other -proms are out there.
The Chairman made a fair number of jokes about the Net Neutrality fight, but I found (reading tea leaves) most of them more favorable to Title II. (Referring to the protesters who blocked his car: "You will note my car is not a hybrid." "The AWS-3 Auction has now earned $41 bn dollars. You know, some wireless companies say that classifying broadband as Title II will stifle investment. Did I mention $41 bn?") Some were directed at Comcast ("Comcast has accused its opponents of exagerating the fear of reprisals for coming forward. I was going to make a joke about [Comcast chief lobbyist] David Cohen here, but he threatened to break my kneecaps.") Other targets were the Washington "Professional Football Team" (there is a petition before the FCC to ban saying the name as indecent/offensive), and other members of the Commission and FCC.
As the Chairman noted in an unscripted aside, he got a lot less laughter this year than last year when he was new and people weren't mad at him yet.
