FCC boss Kevin Martin has traditionally been seen as someone with a personal grudge against the cable industry, though it's more likely the calculating commish was just closer with baby bell lobbyists. Most of the time, what was seen as Martin being "tough on cable" was him simply positioning himself for a post-FCC political career in North Carolina. His indecency efforts were aimed at pleasing family values groups, while his largely unfruitful efforts to cap cable industry growth or "investigate" P2P throttling look pro-consumer, but benefit AT&T.

With Obama winning the Presidency, the cable industry hopes their fortunes could change. Dallas-based AT&T to some degree hitched their cart to the McCain campaign, with a significant number of McCain staffers having deep ties to both AT&T and Verizon. Comcast, however, played a major role in helping bring Obama to office. It turnes out that Comcast's David Cohen (if you recall he threatened to sue the FCC for meddling in their BitTorrent throttling) was a huge Obama contributor, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer:Comcast probably shouldn't be too excited. Obama also got significant support from the unions, and he's very close with Google. While Google CEO Eric Schmidt may not want the job of Obama tech czar, he is on the President-elect's transition team. Both the cable and phone companies consider Google public enemy number one for the search giant's positions on subjects like network neutrality and increased wireless competition. It's fairly unlikely that the phone or cable companies will particularly enjoy Obama's FCC chief selection, either.

Still, for the moment, Comcast just seems happy that Martin will be on his way out. "We hope the process has more clarity and transparency and decisions are based on the public record," a Comcast spokesman tells the Inquirer.