Dave Farber Named FCC Chief Technologist

Telecommunications coder since the 1960s, outspoken professor, and testifier in the Microsoft trial David J. Farber has been named the chief technologist at the FCC. Currently at U-Penn he is working on high-speed networking and distributed computing. Those on his "Interesting People" mailing list know him to be on the cutting edge of the tech memepool. I'll rest a little easier knowing he's "on the inside."

Comments

???

[bubbasatan]

Wouldn't it all be easier if he were at some *meaningful* position, not some lax government job? You know, a job where his talents might be actually used.

The importance of good FCC regulations

[VAXGeek]

A lot of people don't realize how important the FCC is to the operation of the country. They regulate all of the airwaves around here. It's REALLY good to have someone around there that's tech savvy. I don't know if anyone has ever read the "Hacker Crackdown", but in that book, what shocked me was the fact that most of the govt. agents in there were completely ignorant to the operation of computers, even when they were the ones given the responsibility to apprehend all of these hackers during Operation Sun Devil.

Re:The importance of good FCC regulations

[Anonymous Coward]

I especially liked the story of the police officer who was asked for a copy of a disk. So he put the disk on a photocopier and sent the copy.

According to the book, this destroyed the data on the disk (is this true?).

Why the FCC?

[jormurgandr]

Why on earth is he going to the FCC? With his credentials, he could go just about anywhere, and have a lot less people laughing at him too. I'd rather see him at media fusion (article in D Magazine here) working on getting networks up accross the power lines. He could make a much bigger difference there. At the FCC he'll ust be sitting on his duff all day, helping to catch those "terrorist" pirate radio stations...
=======
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

For all the people of the world (except the USA)

[Anonymous Coward]

-- please don't assume we know what the FCC is. What is it ?

Re:For all the people of the world (except the USA

[RobertEdwards]

Federal Communications Commission, a US Gov't agency involved in the regulation of Communications including particularly licenseing of Radio and TV operators and stations. More importantly, they're involved in regulating telephone and related technologies, including universial access and broadband access.

See www.fcc.gov

Maybe we'll get some decent wireless data services

[Phizzy]

Maybe now that we have a techie inside of the FCC, we can get some more government support of wireless data services. That Cisco wireless technology that was posted a while ago (2gbps I think?) could seriously change things if there was enough government support for it. I don't know about the rest of you, but I certainly want to be able to stream mp3s into my car on the highway.

//Phizzy

Bravo!

[nickm]

Dave Farber's motto was once "Photons have neither morals nor visas." Let's hope that he can work this sentiment into the FCC from the lowest wire-monkey to the upper echelons of the spectrum-allocation cabal!
--
I noticed

Re:Bravo!

[Anonymous Coward]

>"Photons have neither morals nor visas."

Of course, I've always been of the opinion that there should never be the requirement or morals nor visas, but then I always did take the most difficult to travel, high road.

the FCC, a historical rant

[doom]

I don't know what to make of this piece of news one way or another, but I second the point that the FCC is extremely important to nearly every realm of the technical world.

The original rational of the FCC was that the bandwidth of radio communications was limited, so you needed this government agency to regulate who owned what frequency and what power (and hence range) they were allowed to have. I'm not sure I agree with this, but at least you can make a case for it (the alternative would involve some pretty chaotic "arms races" with the deepest pockets buying the heaviest signal and stomping on anyone else).

But somehow or other they got from this to a justification for government censorship of the airwaves (restrictions on "sexual or excretory" language, no direct calls to action, noncoms can't mention ticket prices, and so on). This rules are pretty vauge in their details and that seems to be intentional: you don't get shutdown for violating them, but they might be used as a pretext for shutting you down, if it was politically expedient (e.g. there was a college station whose frequency was turned over to a religious group during the Reagan years).

But okay, say that you buy that it's appropriate for the FCC to regulate *broadcast* technology, possibly including speech. How do you justify that the FCC got involved with regulating Cable Television? And now how do you justify that they're getting involved with regulating the Internet? Anything that vaugely involves "communication" seems to fall under the FCCs domain (I expect marriage counsellors will be next).

Anyway, these guys scare me. You're talking about a federal bureaucracy that's in the business of routinely regulating speech, with barely a squeak of anyone shouting "First Ammendment".

Re:the FCC, a historical rant

[Greg Merchan]

I'm sure I'll get some flames for this, but . . .

There was an article by Ayn Rand entitled (IIRC), "The Property Status of Airwaves". If I have a copy of it, I can't find it, so I'm working from memory here.

She stated that the FCC regards all bandwidths as its property, which it lets broadcasters use - if they abide by its every fiat. She saw a number of problems with this including the possibility of censorship or favoritism.

Her solution was that the bandwidths be homesteaded and be regarded as private property, with all that that implies. Broadcasting in someone elses bandwidth would be theft. Broadcasting slanderous or fraudulent claims would be prosecuted as such.

(What follows are my own thoughts, not her's.)

Under this system, (explicit) government censorship would be impossible, because there would be no license to revoke. Illegal methods of censorship, such as murder or bandwidth flooding, are still possible, but that would be an overt act and surely people would act to overthrow a government that would resort to such methods. Less overtly, the government could 'fail' to protect the rights of a broadcaster, which would 'permit' another entity with greater broadcasting power to seize control. I don't know what can be done to prevent these 'planned failures'. I also do not know what could be done about people who, failing to maintain broadcast capabilities, would not sell their claims to bandwidths; A sufficiently monied and motivated fool could buy large parts of the spectrum and leave the air dead.

If the bandwidths were private property, the governments function would be merely to keep public record of ownership and protect that property. This same principle could be applied to IP addresses and domain-names. The government's only acts would be to keep record and protect. At least with regard to domain names, most of the disputes would be easily solved. Someone with a valid IP address would step foward to lay claim to a name. (A commercial entity could not register in the org tld, because that would be fraudulent.) Name squatting would be limited by the need to have a valid IP, but name speculating would not be. (Ain't I a clever wordsmith!). Domain names would not be regarded as even comparable to trademarks just as call letters are not. Come to think of it, there might be a good analogy there: frequency is to call letters as IP addresses are to domain-names. Of course, it's not a perfect analogy. However, if time-domain broadcasting ever takes off, that could change.

Of course, I'm thinking from within the USA, and the internet in worldwide, so there's lot's of things I haven't considered here. IANA and NetworkSolutions seem to have worked, in the sense of not censoring content; perhaps there we have a good model of non-government regulation that needs to be studied further. But of course, IANA et al. have their authority from DARPA or some other parts of governments, so this is more complicated than I care to consider in just this post.

I hope that Dr. Farber is able to bring some wisdom to the FCC instead of being touted as an approving seer when the FCC does something bad. Hopefully, he will be courageous enough to survive and change that pandemonium, or to expose it when needed, or to abandon it and disavow it when he can do no more.

Re:the FCC, a historical rant

[stevew]

The FCC was formed in 1934 - after a period where anyone COULD put up a transmitter and there WAS chaos on the air. So we've already tried that experiment(and by all accounts I've read - it failed miserably.) Now the FCC treats the airwaves not as THEIR property but OUR property. They are considered "in the public domain." They literally have the same status as the street in front of your house. Consequently, access to the airwaves moves from a right to a priviledge. So just as you can obtain a license to operate a motor vehicle on the public streets, you can get a license to operate a radio transmitter on the public airwaves. It's this difference that allows the FCC to regulate content. All the arguments about free speach and such aren't applicable because it isn't a right to operate a radio transmitter. Further, the FCC is the Federal COMMUNICATIONS Commission. So anything that has to do with electronic communication accross state boundaries becomes their operating venue. Simple as that. Thus they are responsible for regulation of telephony as well as radio broadcast. Last comment - Alot of people seem to think the FCC is an "evil" beauracracy. From my observations of them - there are too few of them to worry about. I know the local FCC office had maybe 15 people in 1980. It's now like 4. They are a mere shadow of the agency of the 1970's. It's the congress who keeps chartering them to do more stuff with less that you should worry about! Especially WHAT the congress is telling them to do - you know - things like the CDA come to mind!

The Interesting-People mailing list

[doom]

I just realized that there's an on-line archive of David Farber's Interesting People mailing list.

This proves that they're going too far

[Sloppy]

FCC people should only need to understand radio waves and 1910-era technology. Ok, that's a bit of an overstatement, but that should be the limit of their authority: public media (i.e. radio broadcast frequancies) stuff that nobody owns.

FCC's interference with other media (phone lines, cable, etc) is government control of private communications. That's bad. FCC shouldn't be poking their nose there, and their people don't need to understand these technologies. They don't need a "chief technologist". Why the hell do we keep giving our government more and more power?

---

Re:This proves that they're going too far

[toddler420]

That's the entire point of them appointing a chief technologist. The government (in case you hadn't noticed) has a history of poking their nose in where they don't belong. That's not something that Dave Farber can help. What he can do is help educate the technologically illiterate (read : luser) upper powermongers that are given control over something they shouldn't even touch in the first place. His appointment may not be curing the "disease", but it will certainly help alleviate some of the symptoms.

This should be interesting

[Mr. Protocol]

I take this as unalloyed good news. As far as I can tell the FCC was intended to regulate the use of the radio spectrum. It has had more and more stuff shuffled off onto it, and more and more of its critical decisions taken out of its hands by special-interest legislation in Congress.

Dave has always enjoyed being in the thick of things. It was one of his grad students (Dave Crocker) who, while at Rand, wrote RFC 822. Dave was one of the prime movers behind CSNET, which as far as I can tell was the first ISP...run with government seed money as a trial baloon to see if the Internet could be financially self-sufficient. Dave was not only on the board of directors, he contributed software which he'd had written for other purposes.

The reason that I'm heartened is that Dave isn't an expert in just one thing. He's one of the very few Renaissance men of the Internet, with a perspective far wider than most folks running around today. This is just the sort of person that the FCC needs. Those who think he should be elsewhere, where the "really interesting" stuff is happening, I think underestimate what the FCC is going to be doing (forced into doing) over the next few years.

try reading your history before complaining

[sine23]

there's a very good reason that the FCC is involved in phone and cable, and it's the same reason that the DOJ got involved with microsoft. one word: monopoly.

companies with monopolistic control of a market do things that are not good for consumers, and ultimately, are not good for innovation. microsoft's predatory behavior while cranking out crappy product and forcing people to use it is NOTHING compared to what Ma Bell was up to pre-divestiture.

the problem with the FCC is that phone and cable service, by their nature, represent natural monopolies, and therefore are very tricky to regulate. the FCC is far from perfect, but their ultimate goal is a good one.

Maybe I don't remember my history too well...

[Greg Merchan]

But I think there's a difference between the Bell monopoly and the Microsoft monopoly. The Bell monopoly was far more capable of becoming a natural monopoly because of network effects. Microsoft didn't know what a network was until the mid-nineties, though they seem to have understood network effects. (Maybe they still don't know what a network is? Heh, heh. :)

Strangely, the government granted AT&T a fiat monopoly which explicitly prevented anyone else from competing. So far as I know, they didn't do this with Microsoft.

You might say Microsoft earned a monopoly while AT&T was given a monopoly. Of course, that's assuming that Microsoft didn't steal anything (or otherwise violate anyone's rights) and you'd also have to ignore the effect of IBM choosing MS-DOS as an operating system

Re:Maybe I don't remember my history too well...

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Read even the guiness book of records - AT&T was one the US's biggest monopoly lawsuits. And the US busted them up.

That is why there is more than one AT&T division - and that is why there are so many separate "Baby Bells". By keeping them separate and forcing them to compete against one another the monopoly becomes a company.

Re:Maybe I don't remember my history too well...

[doom]

Before the Bell monopoly was broken up by
the US government, it was officially
sanctioned by the US government. Phone and
cable may be "natural monopolies" or they
might not... we don't know because the
government stepped in and handed them an
exclusive franchise long before any kind
of economic equilibrium was reached.

Re:Maybe I don't remember my history too well...

[doom]

Phone and cable may be "natural monopolies" or they might not... we don't know because the government stepped in and handed them an exclusive franchise long before any kind of economic equilibrium was reached.

I went looking around for some info to confirm or deny my impression of the history of the Bell system. Turns out the situation was more complicated than that, at least according to Bruce Sterling's account in _the Hacker Crackdown_. AT&T originally had to fend off competitors with their patents, and then when the patents expired they used technical innovation to stay ahead, and *then* they embraced government regulation.

(Goddamn reality. Never stays where I put it.)

Anyway, some relevant quotations from Chairman Bruce:

After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone companies sprang up all over America. Bell's company, American Bell Telephone, was soon in deep trouble. In 1907, it fell into the hands of the rather sinister J. P. Morgan financial cartel, robber-baron speculators who dominated Wall Street.

At this point, history might have taken a different turn. America might well have been served forever by a patchwork of locally owned telephone companies. Many state politicians and local businessmen considered this an excellent solution.

But the new Bell holding company, American Telephone and Telegraph, or AT&T, put in a new man at the helm [...] Vail quickly saw to it that AT&T seized the technological edge once again [...] By controlling long distance -- the links between, over and above the smaller local phone companies -- AT&T swiftly gained the whip hand over them, and was soon devouring them right and left.

[...]

Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite willing to accommodate the U.S. government; in fact, he would forge an active alliance with it. AT&T would become almost a wing of the American government, almost another Post Office -- though not quite. AT&T would willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return, it would use the government's regulators as its own police, who would keep out competitors and assure the Bell system's profits and preeminence.

The full text of this book is available on-line in various places. Here's one: The Hacker Crackdown

FCC? Perfect! Farber's a big control freak anyway!

[WSBII]

I certainly give the man his due respect. He absolutely belongs in the Technologist Pantheon. But I must disagree with those lamenting his having taken a government job.

Unfortunately, Farber is NOT ill-suited for the job. He's a perfect fit, for all the wrong reasons. Specifically his testimony in the MS trial presents a puritanical visage that is probably a prerequisite for working in a bureaucracy as gargantuan and entrenched as the FCC.

A quote from the testimony:

"But only the availability of an unbundled version of Windows 98 will cure the difficulties which arise for many OEMs, application developers and retail end users who may find too burdensome the problems arising from their inability to substitute different functions and applications (such as the Web browser) for use with only parts of what is now sold as Windows 98."

Clearly Farber is implying that the government should be allowed to design (or impose design requirements on) Microsoft's software products. Of course some will argue that Farber is only providing a rebuttal to Micrsoft's contention that the browser is an integral (and necessary) part of the evolution of the PC operating system. In fact, he presents an effective counterpoint on this subject. But the additional facts that he 1. worked on the side of the government's obviously specious and authoritarian "case" and 2. concluded his testimony with the above statement clearly indicate that his is yet another in the endless parade of narrow, bureaucratic minds produced by late 20th century academia.

To paraphrase some bimbo: Don't hate me because I'm honest!

Bandwidth, a historical rant

[RobertEdwards]

One problem I see is that the biggest transmitters do not care. If you can't interfere with them, why should they worry about interfering with you? A 100,000 watt station can blast dozens of 10 watt stations off the airwaves. What are the 10 watt stations going to do? Sue? Can't call the FCC. . .

Of course, it seems that there's plenty of this sort of thing going on already.

Re:Bandwidth, a historical rant

[doom]

But he was arguing for "ownership of frequencies", with government backing of the property right. This actually isn't all that different from what the FCC is supposed to do, except that he's saying they should be out of the business of regulating content.

What I was alluding to was a more anarchist approach, let anyone broadcast anything, anywhere at any frequency, at any power, and yeah, a system like that would have the kind of problem you're talking about (I called it "arms races", i.e. he who can blast enough wattage at a given frequency could win that slot). It would be an interesting world... though I can't in all honesty say I'm sure it would be a better one.

(One possiblity is that with the FCC preventing entry of new stations between the old ones on the dial, there's been no incentive to improve radio tuner sensitivity. Could it be that without a standard spacing between frequencies, we'd have a dozen times the number of stations, and really good tuners to pick them out of the chaos?)

Anyway, radical changes in the way the FCC regulates the airwaves are not going to be easy to bring about. I think the real hope is for new technology to get around the FCC (e.g. the development of celluar internet radio), but there's a real danger that the FCC will always be able to scramble after new tech, and claim it as part of their domain.

I remember when...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Dave Farber took the "interesting" people mailing list private and commercial.

To his credit, he eventually realized that people were either not going to pay or that they weren't going to stand for someone leveraging their personal e-mail into a money making scheme. You'd think these tenured professors would make enough money as it is.

Of course, I also remember standing in his office, at the EE Dept. of UoD, asking for a project and being handed the task of porting MMDF from VMS/pascal to Unix/C. Little things like discrete math, calc and courting ended up kicking my sophmore ass all around the campus that semester and I had to give up working with one of the more interesting people at UoD at the time. In retorspect, I probably would have been much better off if I had ported MMDF; eventually we both left UoD for something better (in fact all the good people I knew at the UoD left it some something better and I'm not talking about the students).

I still believe the man has good moral and ethical grounding (there was a case at the UoD where someone "borrowed" a computer to do work and the University was ready to fry; Dr. Farber took the kid under his wing and told the finger pointing pencil pushers to shove-off... and that's just one of a 1000 good things you'll hear about the man); now if we could just get him into an important position at the NSA, that would be an accomplishment.

...sigh, those were the days, my friend.

excellent failures of their own profession

[Anonymous Coward]

I get the feeling that there are a lot of early pioneers who haven't been able to ride the wave of success that is primarily driven by their efforts. Then again, perhaps it's just sage wisdom about the "value" of the vast majority start-ups and IPOs (./ aside, of course!).

Looking at people like Vince Cerf and a few others who have been able to get their slice of instant internet wealth pie (by hook or by crook, I might add), it's easy to forget all the others who built the foundation upon which the current internet rides.

So, consider this a "mercy appointment". Kinda' like appointing Judges for life when they fail to make it as trail lawyer. Nothing wrong with it just as long as you can remove them when they become senile or lose fundamental grasp of reality.

Thing to remember, of course, is that government appointees are never chosen because of their strictly neutral, non-biased and apolitical interperation of their subject area (as one would hope they were).

So, chew on that while you enjoy that nice, warm and fuzzy feeling....

Re:Maybe we'll get some decent wireless data servi

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude,

I hate to tell you this, but the FCC already auction off the frequency space that the cisco gear uses.

Once you take boatloads of money for something, even if you're a government, you can't just make it free without MAJOR repercussions.

Also, the cisco gear is for non-mobile wireless; so, it's highly unlikely that you'll ever drive down the highway listening to your own personal mp3 stream to you via wireless.

Re:For all the people of the world (except the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus...

look on the back of your computer (I'm assuming that you're using one if you're posting to ./); if you're not, don't worry; we're about 2 months from deploying that technology world wide anyway (we heard you talking all about it on our Eschilon net)... and if we don't have the technology, we'll either buy the technology from you or invade your little country and take it from you.

Anyway...

On the back of your computer gear, You will find a little sticker with the FCC ID in the United States. Depending on how backwards your little country is, you might find a similiar sticker, for a similiar beuracratic agency from you're country (modeled after the USA's FCC with minor variations for political curruptness, or lack there of). You will also find, most likely, the FCC TLA expanded out for you in perfect American. You now may continue reading ./ in our native language, American.

Do we have a clue yet?

God, I hope so.

rest easier?

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy has sold out imho if he is in the FCC. The entire premise of that group is atrocious.