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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
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.
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.
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"
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
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.