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

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.

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

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.

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?

---

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.

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.

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