Today marks the one-year anniversary of Julius Genachowski’s tenure as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Looking back on the last year, there have been small efforts made toward enacting policies that will ensure all Americans have access to fast, affordable Internet, but there is still much more to be done.

Since Genachowski was sworn in, the Commission has appeared active, but very little of this activity has resulted in actual policy changes that positively affect the public. At the one-year mark, Free Press is giving the chairman a grade of ‘Incomplete, needs improvement’ across the board. Genachowski needs to be willing to pursue critical policies that protect consumers, even if the largest telecommunications companies don’t like those policies.

The first-year contrast between Genachowski and his two Republican predecessors is stark. Former Chairmen Kevin Martin and Michael Powell quickly pursued the Bush administration’s policy agendas during their first year in office. In Martin’s first few months, he deregulated wireline broadband by classifying it as an information service, resulting in the FCC’s current existential crisis, and approved the massive Verizon-MCI and SBC-AT&T mergers. Those misguided actions forever closed the door on the last vestige of the 1996 Telecommunications Act’s promise of competition and changed the political dynamic in a way that has solidified the cable and telecom industry’s dominance over our broadband marketplace, leaving consumers with few choices, poor service and high prices.

That’s not to say that the Genachowski FCC has done nothing for consumers. However, thus far, the agency has largely failed to adopt policy changes that are not widely supported by the industries it oversees. There have been no efforts to address the real problems of our broadband marketplace -- high prices and slow service due to a lack of meaningful competition -- and instead the Commission has seemed preoccupied with focusing on policies that will benefit the major wired and wireless companies. The public needs a champion willing to challenge those entrenched interests. The biggest policies enacted over the last year -- tower siting “shot clocks,” partial closing of the terrestrial loophole, and approval of the AT&T-Centennial and Verizon-Frontier transactions -- are all unknown to most consumers and heavily supported by the industry lobby.

And while Genachowski did open a proceeding on preserving the open Internet last fall, the chairman’s office is now holding closed-door meetings with industry giants to hammer out a compromise on Net Neutrality that would reportedly pave the way for a closed and discriminatory mobile Internet. If true, this means the Genachowski may be ceding ground on Net Neutrality, the most important Obama administration tech policy priority.

It’s not too late to turn things around. Chairman Martin eventually pursued a few public interest strategies at the end of his term, including the white spaces order and the enforcement against Comcast's Internet blocking practices. To his credit, Genachowski has laid some of the groundwork needed to enact meaningful change, but now he must follow through with decisive action.

Indeed, unless Genachowski makes the politically tough choice to re-establish the FCC’s authority over broadband services, he will go down in history as the chairman who presided over the FCC’s transition to near-irrelevance. In the short term, Genachowski must move forward with his plan to reverse the Bush-era mistakes that put the FCC’s ability to protect consumers in jeopardy. He must restore the agency’s authority to protect the open Internet and implement the National Broadband Plan. History will show that this is the right action to take, and pursuing this path in the face of intense industry pressure will earn Genachowski a place in history as a chairman who did what he had to do to promote the public interest.