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Selling Off The Airwaves
Lone Owl points to a Jeremy Rifkin piece published yesterday in The Guardian about a plan gathering steam to privatize ownership of the radio spectrum currently licensed in the U.S. by the FCC. "37 leading US economists have signed a joint letter asking the FCC to allow broadcasters to lease spectrum they currently license, from the government in secondary markets. Read it here." I wonder what the future of microbroadcasting would be like were this to happen. What would you do if you could buy a little slice of your local spectrum?
Corporations and the governments are both, in theory, organizations consisting of individuals. Why should some corporation's shareholders benefit through my share in a national resource without me getting paid for the priviledge? If you permit these deals to go on between unaccountable bureaucrats and managements at large companies that are themselves well-insulated against shreholder scrutiny, you will get deals that cut you out. Put some money on the table, and see how quick people get up to speed on maximizing the return on spectrum.
The problem is not "public" versus "private." The problem is that there is no sense of ownership by the people who should feel like they own the airwaves. Consequently, you get all kinds of sweetheart deals and good-for-the-nation drivel that masks that this stuff is being given away or traded for favors. You own it. Ask your congressman for your dividend check.
I wrote parts of this stuff
You won't, of course, be able to buy anything. You may, if you're very wealthy, be able to lease a small portion of the spectrum, over which you can transmit a small wattage to a localized area.
Forget about a protected band of public communications being used by hackers or do-gooders to provide a public internet to everyone. Such projects are only possible because the government has set aside those bands for the public good.
If such bands are owned by corporations, which have the choice between selling your entire city wireless internet access on their own terms, and leasing you a bandwidth license so that you can provide the net for free, which do you think they will prefer? How long do you think your lease will last?
And even if you do get a lease, do you honestly think it won't include terms like "lessee agrees that no illegal information shall be transmitted across the leased spectrum, including but not limited to MP3s whose copyright cannot be verified, pirated software, all digitally encoded movies, other intellectual property not owned by the transmittor, nor any decryption programs which are illegal under the DMCA. No access to FreeNet or other encrypted piracy havens shall be allowed, and the license shall be revoked if any unauthorized data transmission is detected."
I mean, we're talking about selling off the internet of the future to companies like Viacom, who owns both MTV and its "competitor" VH1, to Sony and other record labels, to Disney who owns Touchstone, Miramax, and Buena Vista Films. These are the companies that own all the good data. Why would you want to let them set up tollbooths and checkpoints at the on-ramps of the information superhighway?
I'm being silly, of course, because no sane company would lessen its stranglehold of control anyway, unless forced to by the government, but even if they did, do you honestly think that Sony would not bother to park a van outside your home office, monitoring your wireless communications to make sure you aren't trading encrypted MP3s?
Natural monopolies demand regulation.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
After reading the article, I think Mr. Rifkin forgot one thing: he should have read the book The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler.
A major salient point from Toffler is the so-called demassification of the media, meaning that many more people can disseminate information than in the past. Despite the arrival of the media superconglomerates like AOL Time Warner (an entity I have lots of qualms about because of their reach in both media content creation and distribution), the commercialization of the Internet has allowed entities of all political, racial, gender, etc. persuasions to have a voice that can be read by potentially billions of people.
Why do you think ever since the Internet has become commercial that TV viewership and newspaper readership has gone down? Or the fact that only now has the RIAA realized the threat of things like Napster bypassing all the middlemen in terms of music distribution?
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Here's the crux of the debate: what does the invisible hand do well, and what doesn't it do well?
That's the policy question we really should be asking. Do we know if the invisible hand uses the radio spectrum better than the FCC -- or average citizen -- would? Nope.
Here's my plan for an experiement: let's take the existing spectrum, and carve it up into 3 areas. One portion of the spectrum is administered by the FCC as it is now. One portion is leased to commerical entities for a period of something like 10-20 years. They can trade those leases as they like. One last portion is given out to the public to do whatever they please with. All three groups (anyone using or leasing a portion of the spectrum) are required to report what they've done with it -- both in terms of services provided and gross/net returns.
Then we review each method for results on best services....
--
Tweet, tweet.
Well here's the letter. Lets be grateful the Internet wasn't regulated, we would still all be trying to use ISO. Just think what can be done if the Internet is coupled with a free market in communcations.
Feel free to argue that nobody should own the airwaves, and that anybody should be able to transmit on a frequency that nobody else is currently using. That's not what Jeremy is arguing. He's arguing that central planning is smarter than the market. Well, Jeremy, get a clue: the failure of the Soviet Union buried that corpse of an idea.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
No, you'll be forced to buy a tuner. You can bet there will be 1,001 set-top products available that receive and rebroadcast on channel 2/3/whatever.
---
My opinions are mine.
Don't worry, the media conglomerates likely won't leave any little slice for you and I to buy, and on the off chance they do, it'll come with a seven figure price tag.
The spectrum shouldn't be sold (to the highest bidder, or any private entity)--if this is allowed, then the U.S. government will have again abdicated its rightful role as steward of the airwaves for the less lofty role of plundering profiteer.
Your argument is based on the assumption that the entire frequency spectrum will be given/sold to one monopolistic entity you call "corporations".
There is of course no such proposal and no such entity. If frequencies were treated as property, it would behave just like any other tradable commodity, with a huge variety of owners and usages.
The current system is a government monopoly run by the FCC, which for most purposes act as a proxy for the major media companies through the normal ways that the governenment is controlled by big money and special interest. Rest assured that they are very happy that people believe the current system is run in the interests of the people and that chaos would ensue were the government's power to be relinquished.
The arguments heard here against frequency ownership are the same as the standard ones against land ownership. "What if somebody bought all the land" etc.
Yet experience shows very clearly that private ownership of land is one of the key factors in the prosperity and freedom of nations and people. Not only is private land ownership the basis for economic well being, there is no recorded example of political freedom without it.
So you need to explain what makes radio frequencies work the opposite way. I've yet to see any such example.
One difference that would seem to make frequencies even less likely to be monopolized is that there is an infinite number (in theory, in practice at least several thousand) of frequencies in every geographical location, so you can have many different owners in one location, as opposed to land where there can only be one.
I think we can all agree that in the present system the FCC has a monopolistic control of the airwaives. And I would argue that the FCC in turn is controlled by the major media corporations through lobbying and contributions and through the usual symbiosis between the regulator and the regulated. Moving to a property based system would actually break the grip the media giants have.
The big boys acquire their frequency allocations through their political connections and political appeals to ideas like "the people's airwaves", then they want to lease "their" airwaves out? Why don't they lease their air-waves from the government? After all, without the government defending their legal entitlements to the air-waves, there would be little value in owning the air waves.
Rifkin is right to be concerned about the double-standards, injustices and dangers of this situation, but the same problem exists with all real estate and, indeed, wealth in general -- it is just called out in stark relief by frequency spectrum allocations.
As one of the key players in obtaining the first Ka-band allocation from the FCC, I am here to tell you the system of allocations is rigged to hand power over to the politically connected. I won't go into all the stuff we had to do to get a new spectrum licensed, but it wasn't pretty. I'll just stay this: Had it not been for the fact that I volunteered as a get-out-the-vote phone coordinator for Rep. George Brown, chairman of the House committee on Space and Science, I wouldn't have been able to contribute much to the opening of that new spectrum.
It was largely as a result of that experience in trying to advance technological frontiers with the US Federal Government that I came up with a white paper on a net asset tax to not only offload tax burdens from capital gains, income and sales, but also to open up all undefined assets to private claims without government intervention, except as defender of the legal system under which claims to those rights were made valuable assets.
The Telecommunications Act of 1934 got government into the business of handing out "the people's airwaves" to the politically connected media giants (a pattern that is continuing to this day with Reston, VA-based AOL/Time-Warner enjoying a government assist against Microsoft), as well as establishing a state-backed monopoly on wire communications. I'm actually of the opinion that the banking panic of 1907, the great stock market crash of 1929 and the New Economy Crash of 2000 were, all, part of a pattern in which new media technologies are created, social controls are being threatened and capital manipulations occur in such a way as to depress prices of newly emerging media companies enabling them to be bought on the cheap. Such social controls need not, of course, be consciously planned since they may be evolutionary emergent controls and evolution is, almost by definition, not a conscious process. Nevertheless, if this theory is correct, then just as cinema came under the control of a few giants after 1907 and broadcast came under the control of those same giants after 1929 (via the TCA of 1934), the NASDAQ crash of 2000 may allow giants to buy up and centralize Web/Internet media assets on the cheap. This sort of nonsense is profoundly destructive to culture, itself the basis of human social organization including technological advances, given the key role media companies play in defining culture.
Ultimately, this gets back to the true nature of "fiat" money and how otherwise worthless assets acquire value with the assurance of rights by warriors.
Seastead this.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
for some strange reason this has been opposed by the bigger interests.
So I see this, and I think that this is somethng that the "big boys" would like only so long as they have their fingers in the pie. In this regard, this is compatible with the business aims of entities similar to the RIAA, MPAA, the Microsoft Monopoly, etc.
The little fellow is not allowed direct ownership, just to hand over money on a continuing basis. This has interesting imnplications for political speech.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
why do they put "public interest" in quotes.
It gets worse. The first paragraph says that their plan will be of great benefit to "consumers, entrepreneurs, and the growth of our economy".
That is the kind of thinking that distinguishes economic theory as ideological justification of the interests of corporations. There is no public interest in a society without a public composed of citizens. Consumers do not agregate into a public but into "demand".
The 37 liers do not recognize a real "public interest" because they have no concept of citizenship and of public. They offer a political revolution but they pretend to say nothing political. "Objective" economic theory allows them to masquerade as technocrats offering "increased efficiency" without political implications.
In itself, there is nothing wrong with selling off the spectrum and allowing a market to "create efficiencies", as long as one remembers the public purpose of markets, and especially the public function of communication. But as the letter clearly shows, the promoters of markets today have all but forgotten these public functions. Their only notion of the good is economic growth, and the only aspect of humanity they are aware of is consumption. Under such circumstances, their plan is an invitation for another corporate landgrab that will leave our society even poorer that it is.
Of course, this letter comes just in time as the FCC got Little Powell as its new chairperson. Since Little Powell has made it clear that his idea of the public good is corporate welfare, I expect this proposition to given a serious and sympathetic airing.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
You mean Howard Stern is in the public good? Howard Stern is in the good of Infinity Broadcasting, a former part of CBS which was split from CBS (although CBS is a major stockholder) so CBS could own more stations in major markets. It's all out of hand. Local broadcasting is dead, 80% of the stations are owned by 4 large corporations. Outside of broadcasting, three major telcos own almost all of the cellular and PCS spectrum allocations, and anyone who wants to compete in the wireless Internet game needs to use unlicensed 2.4 and 5 gig spread spectrum bands. Let's face it, the FCC has sold out a long time ago. Simply calling it a lease is admitting to the current state of affairs. And courtesy of the NAB, some of those leaseholders paid nothing for their leases.
What most people would do is figure out they could sell it to the big players for big bucks, thus killing off microbroadcasting. Hell, the corps could even buy the spectrum just to remove competition.
Anyway, the US gov is slowly selling off more and more of the public good to big corporations to make a profit. The communications corporations were licensed the spectrum in order to serve the public good, not themselves.
I can give three important examples: Cable, Satellite, and most importantly, Internet. Cable came first, and let some of our content be off of the air. Then came satellite, which took our content, and made it possible to send just about anywhere. Finally came the Internet, which is toplling the old line structure altogether.
The only reason the government licensed the airwaves was because of scarcity of spectrum space. However, it is quite obvious that with the Internet, there is no scarcity. Any Joe can make a website. (or even start a website company) THe Internet is still, realistically, in its infancy compared with other media. THe unique thing about the Internet however, is that it IS all media. Print, video, film, audio, music, art, and everything else come together to form the MULTImedia experience that is the Internet.
The Airwaves just might not be needed anymore.
(Although I'm opposed to broadcasters selling off what they LICENSE, since the airwaves are PUBLIC DOMAIN)
-Digitizer
Contrary to popular belief, I don't actually make my website for other people to look at.
Actually the analog TV spectrum will cease to exist in the UK from 2005, thus disabling all analog TV reception. It's not a question of cost or of Luddism. Simply I do not need digital TV/radio because I'm happy with what I've got.
Scroogle
Digital TV/radio is supposedly the thing. But for me all I want is a picture on screen and sound from the speakers. Digital TV/radio is simply a technology I don't need or want. Not for me the feature-bloated digital receiver units with time-shift recording/copy lock-out technology. I say this because there is nothing wrong with my analog TV and analog radio. I get an adequate picture and sound. I can record any program without technological restriction. The times and manner of my viewing and listening are under my control. In short, analog is enough for me.
Unfortunately in the UK, the government announced this week that the entire analog TV spectrum will be sold by auction in 2005, meaning that millions of people who are happy with their analog TV sets will be forced in 2005 to spend $200-300 per set on a forced upgrade to a proprietary adapter unit (or else sign up to a restrictive rental agreement) in order to be able to receive digital TV broadcasts. This will affect all TV channels including the UK's national public television service BBC TV. I and millions of others will be forced to go digital from 2005, enforcing the various unwanted usage lock-out technologies that come with digital TV/radio.
Scroogle
I don't think you could do much with the airwaves except express your point of view. You couldnt play any music, the RIAA would beat you with a law stick. You could not report the sports, lest the different sports agencies beat you with their law sticks, or bats depending on the agency. You would be able to express your view. A view that the place we now live in is getting more and more fucked up by the day. A place where you might get sued if you reveal how you broke a copy-protection scheme, by the people who ASKED you do break it. You cannot post your own guitar tablature for others to view. You cannot like dark music, dress gothic and go to school lest people think you might SNAP! and start shooting people. You cannot imagine when the last time you did not get spam was. You cannot talk about your gun collection and knife and sword collection at work because you will be labeled off and fired for being a threat to safety. All these and more you can say on the radio, not many people will listen to you as they do not care about such things as privacy. Most dont care about how many databases contain their address, name, phone numbers for every place they have lived in the last 15 years. For the most part people will say "If it does not affect me, why should I care." they, of course, do not realize that by the time it does affect them it will be too late.
So tell me, what would YOU do with your airtime. I for one would not spend a single dime on something that I can do for free. I can post my views, I can talk to people and I can say whatever I damn well please. I would not pay to say it because The Bill of Rights says I DO NOT HAVE TO!
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
Yes, the FCC sold out some time ago, but what did they sell? How can anyone "own" the electro-magnetic spectrum? What's next, taxing gravity?
Every time the FCC threatens to encroach on our air space, we flood them with mail and protests. Rest assured that there will always be people who can operate radio transmitters for personal purposes or the common good. They'll have to confiscate all the equipment from every HAM shack on the planet and lobotomize each and every one of us and keep us from getting our hands on any source of wire and electricity (with which can be made crude radio transmitters).
As for digital.. heck ya, I love digital technology, but in an emergency when the computers and satellites are all down, I want a trusty CW rig so I can still communicate.
KB9KEJ
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
The truth is, nobody could realistically afford to purchase the airwaves today if the purchase price took into account the future revenues they will generate (even over a limited timespan, like 100 years.) The fact that these corporations think that they have a chance to buy the spectrum implies that they certainly aren't going to pay a fair price for it.