Michael K. Powell (born March 23, 1963) is an American politician and a Republican. He was appointed to the Federal Communications Commission by President Bill Clinton on 3 November 1997. President George W. Bush designated him chairman of the commission on 22 January 2001. Powell is the son of former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

He was born in Birmingham, Alabama and in 1985 graduated from the College of William and Mary on an ROTC Scholarship. Powell was an armored cavalry officer in the United States Army stationed in Amberg, Germany , but was unable to serve after sustaining severe injuries in 1987 during a training mission. He and his unit were traveling in a convoy on the autobahn. Powell was riding in a jeep at the time. Due to heavy, the jeep crashed and Powell was hurled skyward. After he hit the pavement, the jeep bounced and crashed down on Powell's midsection - flattening it, and bounced off.

Half of Powell's pelvis had snapped off its rear anchor on the lower spine. In the front, it had ripped free of the cartilage connecting it to its other half. His bladder was torn and the urethra was ripped loose. Vertebrae were cracked and even his bones literally gushed blood.

After a few hours, and some cursory attention from German emergency room doctors, Powell was flown to a U.S. Army hospital in Nuremberg. After being stabilized, he was flown to Washington, D.C. and admitted to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he spent a year of recovery at. To this day, his spine is still fused at its base, forcing him to walk with a slight forward pitch.

After his rehabilitation he served as an expert advisor to the Secretary of Defense. Powell later received a law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center and clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals. He then worked for a a year and a half as a private attorney in the Washington office of O'Melveny & Myers, an L.A.-based firm as well as in the antitrust division of the Justice Department for a year.

As the chairman of the FCC, Powell has led from his long-stated philosophy of less government regulation of telecom. Powell sees excessive regulation as stifling to technology innovation, and has led the charge to open up markets in VoIP, Wi-Fi, and Broadband over Powerline (BPL). While the FCC has recently stepped up efforts to enforce pre-existing decency rules (prompted in large part by an incident during the halftime of the 2004 Super Bowl in which Janet Jackson's bare nipple was exposed on live-broadcast television), Powell himself has been careful to distance himself from those wishing to strongly regulate content. Powell has spoken publicly about the differences between the commission members' stances on indecency, underscoring the sensitivity of the issue during 2004's Jackson hysteria.

Powell resigned as Chairman of the FCC on January 21st, 2005. He said that he was glad to spend more time with his wife.

External links

• Biography from FCC
• Biography from Forbes magazine
• Interview with the Online Journalism Review

• Interview with reason magazine
• Powell's Statement On Leaving the Commission