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If we had Open Spectrum we would not have to worry about Slashdotting or sold to the highest bidder cell phone service.

Liberate the specturm or you will suffer digital restrictions. Vista's checking of line voltages to make sure no one has clipped on an analog recording device should tell you where all of this is going. The RIAA has been screaming about "radio pirates" for 50 years. Digital broadcast gives them a way to close the "analog hole" they so dread. If the makers colude with broadcasters, only "authorized" players will have keys to decode "HD" signals. If the specturm is liberated, everything will be high quality because no one but big publishers wants to degrade music.

That "Liberate the spectrum" link is blocked from where I work, classified as Pornography.

Clicky the linky and welcome yourself to the 21st century. Well, at least the 1970s. You might also look into how traditional radio failed emergency workers on 9/11 and think about all of that the next time you browse the net at a coffee shop. EM does not "interfere" with itself, it adds just as light does.

Liberate the specturm or you will suffer digital restrictions. Vista's checking of line voltages to make sure no one has clipped on an analog recording device should tell you where all of this is going. The RIAA has been screaming about "radio pirates" for 50 years. Digital broadcast gives them a way to close the "analog hole" they so dread. If the makers colude with broadcasters, only "authorized" players will have keys to decode "HD" signals. If the specturm is liberated, everything will be high quality because no one but big publishers wants to degrade music.

Control of spectrum and right of way make that kind of networking difficult and slow. Why should we cede control of public resources to private companies? Why give up freedom of press? Let's just take back the spectrum.

Allocated spectrum is a crime. That link was supposed to be in the above, but I pushed the wrong button.

The real solution is open sectrum. Networks and software are both better when they don't have owners, but spectrum belongs to everyone by default. Broadcast allocations of spectrum based on 100 year old radio technology and government protected telco and cable monopolies are the reason we are having problems but neither are technical necessities.

It's a shame the "industry expert" did not point these technical realities out instead of acting like further private control of public communications was the answer to industry and government created scarcity.

If Nokia allows me to remove the parts of their device that do SIM locking and DRM, they might as well not bother with DRM. Code that prevents me from removing such things violates GPL3 and Nokia will not be able to distribute any GPL3 code on a device like that. They won't even try if they believe what they tell others about respecting "intellectual property". A system that won't work if it's modified by the user is not a free system.

Nokia is not the real villain. US Cell phone companies may not allow free software devices to access their networks now or ever. This is probably what Nokia spokesmen think is the reality developers have to get used to. I'd rather get used to spectrum freedom and forget about US cell phone companies.

Spectrum should not be owned. As long as the spectrum is owned by a small number of companies that don't really compete, we will all have to use the crap they allow us to use to connect to their network.

A half measure would be for regulators to devise reasonable standards for connecting to networks so that any device made could be used. This would give people the ability to guard their privacy but it would not save the economy from tremendous parasitic communications costs.

I'd rather see real competition in network service than some kind of BS regulation for monopoly service. It's fine to require neutrality out of companies that use public servitude lines but it's not OK to limit access to that servitude. A better solution will be open spectrum.

The details of the box are going to be what you expect. A tivo like mix of free and non free code that GPL 3 is designed to bust. I want one of these things like I want a tivo or a paperweight.

That's what the FCC is supposed to do. That's what it was created to do: Make sure everybody's toys will play nice with everybody else's toys.

too bad that's TOTALLY UNNECESSARY!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_radio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Radio
http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/framing_openspectrum.html
http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/OpenSpectrumFAQ.html
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/03/12/spectrum/index.html

The myth of interference
Internet architect David Reed explains how bad science created the broadcast industry.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Weinberger

March 12, 2003 | There's a reason our television sets so outgun us, spraying us with trillions of bits while we respond only with the laughable trickles from our remotes. To enable signals to get through intact, the government has to divide the spectrum of frequencies into bands, which it then licenses to particular broadcasters. NBC has a license and you don't.

Thus, NBC gets to bathe you in "Friends," followed by a very special "Scrubs," and you get to sit passively on your couch. It's an asymmetric bargain that dominates our cultural, economic and political lives -- only the rich and famous can deliver their messages -- and it's all based on the fact that radio waves in their untamed habitat interfere with one another.

Except they don't.

"Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature." So says David P. Reed, electrical engineer, computer scientist, and one of the architects of the Internet. If he's right, then spectrum isn't a resource to be divvied up like gold or parceled out like land. It's not even a set of pipes with their capacity limited by how wide they are or an aerial highway with white lines to maintain order.

Spectrum is more like the colors of the rainbow, including the ones our eyes can't discern. Says Reed: "There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green. We could instantly hook up to the Internet everyone who can pick up a radio signal, and they could pump through as many bits as they could ever want. We'd go from an economy of digital scarcity to an economy of digital abundance."

So throw out the rulebook on what should be regulated and what shouldn't. Rethink completely the role of the Federal Communications Commission in deciding who gets allocated what. If Reed is right, nearly a century of government policy on how to best administer the airwaves needs to be reconfigured, from the bottom up.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Spectrum as color seems like an ungainly metaphor on which to hang a sweeping policy change with such important social and economic implications. But Reed will tell you it's not a metaphor at all. Spectrum is color. It's the literal, honest-to-Feynman truth.

David Reed is many things, but crackpot is not one of them. He was a professor of computer science at MIT, then chief scientist at Software Arts during its VisiCalc days, and then the chief scientist at Lotus during its 1-2-3 days. But he is probably best known as a coauthor of the paper that got the Internet's architecture right: "End-to-End Arguments in System Design."

Or you may recognize him as the author of what's come to be known as Reed's Law -- which says the true value of a network isn't determined by the number of individual nodes it connects (Metcalfe's Law) but by the far higher number of groups it enables. But I have to confess that I'm biased when it

That's what the FCC is supposed to do. That's what it was created to do: Make sure everybody's toys will play nice with everybody else's toys.

too bad that's TOTALLY UNNECESSARY!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_radio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Radio
http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/framing_openspectrum.html
http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/OpenSpectrumFAQ.html
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/03/12/spectrum/index.html

The myth of interference
Internet architect David Reed explains how bad science created the broadcast industry.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Weinberger

March 12, 2003 | There's a reason our television sets so outgun us, spraying us with trillions of bits while we respond only with the laughable trickles from our remotes. To enable signals to get through intact, the government has to divide the spectrum of frequencies into bands, which it then licenses to particular broadcasters. NBC has a license and you don't.

Thus, NBC gets to bathe you in "Friends," followed by a very special "Scrubs," and you get to sit passively on your couch. It's an asymmetric bargain that dominates our cultural, economic and political lives -- only the rich and famous can deliver their messages -- and it's all based on the fact that radio waves in their untamed habitat interfere with one another.

Except they don't.

"Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature." So says David P. Reed, electrical engineer, computer scientist, and one of the architects of the Internet. If he's right, then spectrum isn't a resource to be divvied up like gold or parceled out like land. It's not even a set of pipes with their capacity limited by how wide they are or an aerial highway with white lines to maintain order.

Spectrum is more like the colors of the rainbow, including the ones our eyes can't discern. Says Reed: "There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green. We could instantly hook up to the Internet everyone who can pick up a radio signal, and they could pump through as many bits as they could ever want. We'd go from an economy of digital scarcity to an economy of digital abundance."

So throw out the rulebook on what should be regulated and what shouldn't. Rethink completely the role of the Federal Communications Commission in deciding who gets allocated what. If Reed is right, nearly a century of government policy on how to best administer the airwaves needs to be reconfigured, from the bottom up.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Spectrum as color seems like an ungainly metaphor on which to hang a sweeping policy change with such important social and economic implications. But Reed will tell you it's not a metaphor at all. Spectrum is color. It's the literal, honest-to-Feynman truth.

David Reed is many things, but crackpot is not one of them. He was a professor of computer science at MIT, then chief scientist at Software Arts during its VisiCalc days, and then the chief scientist at Lotus during its 1-2-3 days. But he is probably best known as a coauthor of the paper that got the Internet's architecture right: "End-to-End Arguments in System Design."

Or you may recognize him as the author of what's come to be known as Reed's Law -- which says the true value of a network isn't determined by the number of individual nodes it connects (Metcalfe's Law) but by the far higher number of groups it enables. But I have to confess that I'm biased when it

However, if broadcast spectrum was just a free-for-all of everyone doing whatever the hell they wanted, it would be chaos, since people would be free interfere like hell with each other's uses without there being a particularly clear cut way of determining what's okay and what isn't. Thus, the broadcast spectrum is more or less owned by the government who then leases out the spectrum under various conditions.

except that this is TOTALLY WRONG.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_spectrum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radi o
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_radio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Radio

http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/OpenSpectrumFAQ.ht ml
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/14/lessig_explai ns_open.html
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003708.shtml
http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/03/12 /spectrum/index.html

To enable signals to get through intact, the government has to divide the spectrum of frequencies into bands, which it then licenses to particular broadcasters. NBC has a license and you don't.

Thus, NBC gets to bathe you in "Friends," followed by a very special "Scrubs," and you get to sit passively on your couch. It's an asymmetric bargain that dominates our cultural, economic and political lives -- only the rich and famous can deliver their messages -- and it's all based on the fact that radio waves in their untamed habitat interfere with one another.

Except they don't.

"Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature." So says David P. Reed, electrical engineer, computer scientist, and one of the architects of the Internet. If he's right, then spectrum isn't a resource to be divvied up like gold or parceled out like land. It's not even a set of pipes with their capacity limited by how wide they are or an aerial highway with white lines to maintain order.

Spectrum is more like the colors of the rainbow, including the ones our eyes can't discern. Says Reed: "There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green. We could instantly hook up to the Internet everyone who can pick up a radio signal, and they could pump through as many bits as they could ever want. We'd go from an economy of digital scarcity to an economy of digital abundance."

So throw out the rulebook on what should be regulated and what shouldn't. Rethink completely the role of the Federal Communications Commission in deciding who gets allocated what. If Reed is right, nearly a century of government policy on how to best administer the airwaves needs to be reconfigured, from the bottom up.

They should be worried, because when everything is going over IP there is no reason to use the Frequencys in a monopolistic way to broadcast Phone, Radio or Television. Thanks to the Millitary, that want full network-connectivity in every backward country they attack, we will soon be able to build broadband dynamic wireless meshes without big efford everywhere in the world. Every static or mobile Device will be able to receive and transmit and Forward Traffic in different Freqencies and powers.

The first Grassroot-Movements allready startet to free the Spectrum from Monopolys:
http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/OpenSpectrumFAQ.ht ml

If you what to know why it should work, read the "Radio Revolution":
http://werbach.com/docs/RadioRevolution.pdf

The solutions is simple: Open up the Airwaves.

You are so right! We should not trust "regulators" to decide what balance means. Our constitution (the USAs) protects freedom of speech for that very reason. Our founders did not want the state to determine what kinds of speech were to be permitted. It did not matter what reason the speech was restricted -- let the people decided what is fair, and what to listen to and what to ignore.

There was a state interest in encouraging many voices using the fairness doctrine back when broadcast TV was essentially limited to three stations -- NBC, CBS and ABC. But in an age when we have dozens or even hundreds of stations, it has out lived its usefulness. Now any such doctrine can only be an instrument of censorship. The solution now is to encourage diversity by first opening up the broadcast spectrum in radio (see this Open Spectrum FAQ..

Buying up our spectrum like this installs a natural monopoly that is inefficient.

A better system would be for public/gov to create a network of towers for wimax/wifi.

I BETYA SPRINT WILL MAKE WIMAX REALLY AFFORDABLE FOR EVERYONE !!!!
http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&p a=showpage&pid=37
http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/OpenSpectrumFAQ.ht ml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_spectrum

Geeze, I remember reading about the possibilities of Open Spectrum something like four years ago. Unless people were just making things up the whole time, my understanding is that yes, of course the FCC is obsolete. The catch is, usually if something is obolete the response is to upgrade rather than discard it. So the FCC's frequency allocation powers should be swapped out for a standards enforcement policy, and broadcasters can be licensed the way drivers are licenced.

Personally, I hope he's planning to make arguments and ask that the Supreme Court force a reworking of the FCC to be completed no later than 2025. Waiting until 2025 to even make the case seems like a huge waste of time to me.

I wonder what it mean to the open spectrum movement. http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/OpenSpectrumFAQ.ht ml

I'm surprised no one has mentioned GNU Radio or the open spectrum concept in general.

There's no reason for the FCC to continue to exist, but this guy's idea of the alternative is just a little off.

Given the 2002 selections (whether your favorite won or not, it was that close) there's a solution we can win with, and you all know it. Remember the old open spectrum stuff posted here several times?

Seems to me, the first candidate to oppose our own axis of evil stands to make it over the top if they have the sense to get their opposition plastered all over the p2p networks, most especially if they can make a quick and good case for the idea that the issues of p2p and open spectrum are one and the same. (I'd use the term "connectivity", since it seems to be the language of the open spectrum folk. Open spectrum is to current tv/radio what p2p sharing is to riaa's website, in more ways than one.) And of course, even if they lose, any dent in the numbers means no future candidate can afford to lose the advantage of a p2p presence, media contributions be ... lost.

Another problem is a lot of the analysis assumes the current world of artificial wireless bandwidth scarcity and high prices. But that could change. Mesh networks could allow devices to create their own wireless infrastructure, with no access charges, obviating fancy tricks for saving money.

You noticed that too, eh? They're projecting forward "five to 10 years" and yet they assume the antiquated cell-tower broadcast scheme will still be dominate. The telco monopoly sure won't last THAT long in the face of better tech.

Partial Open Spectrum and adhoc wireless mesh networking is a much more likely evolution. Though I expect we'll still be calling the devices "cell phones" out of habit.

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