[jcranmer]

> I don't see any benefit to someone in charge of regulating the communications industry having ever worked in communications.

If you replace "communications" with "construction", you're advocating that the people regulating building codes should have absolutely no prior experience actually building things, and I imagine that is not a stance you would take. Why then is communication so different from construction?

The point of regulatory agencies is to take the aspirational goals of laws passed by the legislature and turn them into concrete, executable frameworks. This means you need people who are far more experienced on how companies are going to react to changes in regulation than the people who write the laws. Without personal experience, people are going to have rely a lot more on the corporate lobbying to make sense of what's going on, and they're going to have less basis to understand intentional misdirection in corporate responses.