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Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy
js7a writes "The New America Foundation has published The Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy (pdf). An excellent 14 page guide that everyone should print a few copies of to have handy in the backpack or car. Learn what would happen if the government regulated speech the same way they regulate airwaves. Learn the truth about microbroadcasting, smart radio, and so-called intererence (all previously covered on Slashdot.) Learn more creative ways to tell Congress to stop giving away public resources to private corporations. Make the most of your rights to use unlicensed wireless, before it's too late."
These guys just don't get it.
Loud speakers are regulated too. Tonight at midnight local time, go out to your car, open the windows, and turn up the radio as loud as it will go. Cops will be visiting you shortly for distrubing the piece. See, you need a license if you're going to speak so loudly such that your sound is going to travel beyond your property and/or personal area.
These are just outlandish comparisions that don't hold water...
The FCC needs to regulate the air waves. Given, they do go a bit far in some cases. What if they did not? Personally, I would not like to be driving down the road listening to some nice music on the radio only to have it interrupted by death metal or the sounds of porn. That 802.11a/b/g connection you are using would be a whole hell of a lot less secure and reliable if they did not regulate.
Not sure what a few copies of this in the back of your car would do? Maybe you can hand it out with candy at your local school. It doesn't add to any debate, it provides no support for its assertations and propagates myths.
Not helpful
your loud speaker can't be heard fifty miles away, and your whispering can't be intercepted or interefere with everyone within a few blocks of your location. Left out that minor detail. It's all a matter of scale.
What happens when I decide to be an asshole about it? Say you are happily using your WiFi connection at home, along with others in the neighbourhood. You are happier still since there is no power restriction, so you've cranked it a bit and it reaches all corners of your house.
Then I come along and decide that I don't like you all, for whatever reason. So I build a transmitter that operates on the WiFi band, but spews noise with 2000 watts of power through a massive antenna. Suddenly your WiFi is worthless. However there's nothing you can do, since there's no regulation. What I'm doing is legal, though assinie.
We have to share the airwaves just like we have to share roads. As we've found out all through history, you need rules when people have to share something or some assholes will abuse it. Hence, regulations on the airwaves.
I'm not saying they are perfect and need to changes, but they ARE necessary.
The question is, how much of the spectrum should remain open to the public and how much of the spectrum should be allocated to licensees, and how much interference (if any) on licensed airwaves is permissable and is it practical to allow portions of the spectrum remain unlicensed?
Most of their analogies seem relavent. Yeah, you may not be able to shout over/interupt a candidate (which would essentially be the equivalent of attempting to use the same part of the spectrum that the candidate is "shouting" over), but you are, generally speaking, allowed to speak in softer tones to those in your immediate vicinity (referred to as "whispering" in the cartoons).
If it is true that advances in technology allow radio signals to more intelligently distinguish and filter out different signals from different sources, perhaps instead of licensing the entire spectrum (or letting a lot of the spectrum go to waste), they should simply mandate that devices have the technology to "intelligently" distinguish and filter signals.
There is a typo in page 16 (page 10 of the pdf file.
Humans can hear frequencies from 20 Hz to 20 kHz
not 20 kHz to 20000 kHz.
The 0 kHz in the radio makes me think somebody typoed all "Hz" words to "kHz".
I agree with the overall message that the FCC should allow more free spectrum. If we look at the proliferation of devices on 2.4 and 5.8, we can see the sucess of the unlicense space versuse the licensed space. Anyone want to bet where more money is flowing through? If we took down 2.4 and 5.8, would the economy suffer more than if we took down any other two spectrums?
Free Willy!
Even if you don't interfere with broadcasters you can still get it trouble. If you set up a "pirate" station at low-to-medium power on an unused frequency the FCC can shut you down.
It's a crude and inefficient regulatory system designed to work with receivers using 1930's technology.
>You're only allowed to affect the radios in your immediate area, not to set up a major broadcaster that'd interfere with the already licensed stations.
Your cellphone doesn't interfere with mine even if we're next to each other. We could even be on the same frequency if we have CDMA phones with different spreading codes.
The article tries to make the point that we have technology like cellphones today and can start regulating on the basis of "follow the rules of the road" rather than letting 1935 receiver technology force us into "only one car on the road at a time".
No, a properly written article on the benefits and draw backs of liscencing the airwaves would have been better - using frank and somewhat comical analogies is fine, but keep it real. This whole comic is just a bunch of "OMG THE GOVERMENT OWNS OUR AIR" crap, very light on facts and counter-arguments.
Like a wireless network instead of 'broadcasting' which is outdated. Broadcasting is old school and is a waste of time. We need a public longdistance wifi network.
How recently is this guy talking about? Will the radio in my '92 Acura be able to work like that? What about even older devices? Or would the recommended policy make all those radios obsolete?
I'm generally against overuse of government power, but it seems the new technology has to fully overtake the old technology before the government changes their policy.
Or maybe this is a dumbed down version of the argument and I'm missing something.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Correct, while Very Low Frequency radios exist the bands are not usable. In the 50s there was much experimentation in these areas, but mosly listening to nature make noises and seeing how transmissions on these bands affected nature. Naturally occurring ELF & VLF radio phenomena make it very hard to reliably use this area for communications, especially when you can bump up a few hz and get much better results. Also, how would you transmit on 0Hz? Your antenna would be infinitely large...
1) The right to say something offensive to somebody before they beat your ass. You're protected under the law as a victim of the crime of battery, but the perp didn't violate your free speech rights.
2) The right to say something at work that gets you fired. Your employer has no obligation to let you say anything you want. They have the right to put their own best interests first with regard to your speech.
3) And yes, the right to broadcast on radio and television. It's not a right, it's a privilege. More about that in a moment.
So, what is this mysterious freedom of speech that people talk about all the time? Well, it's hard for many Americans (most westerners, actually) to understand what it really means, because we've never known anything else. Well, like calling President Bush an idiot, for example. You're allowed to do that. You won't get shot or thrown in jail for saying it. You're allowed to say basicaly anything you want to and the federal government can't come after you for it, with some obvious exceptions:
1) If you suggest that you're going to harm the President or anybody else under Secret Service protection.
2) If you call in a bomb threat or any other kind of threat.
3) If you lie to an investigator or in a court of law
Now, back to the topic at hand. It's probably a great idea, now that radios are getting good enough to distinguish the signal they want from the signal they don't want. Of course, you can't really expect the government to jump on this development immediately. One great thing about radio is that it's really backward compatible. You can still use radios from many decades ago and they work just fine.
The part where I get upset is when people get upset about evil corporations buying the airwaves. Yes, the FCC has had some pretty crappy decisions in the last 15 years or so about their ownership rules, allowing companies like Clear Channel and Cox to reallly build major empires. But it's not a free speech violation. We do not and have never had any right to broadcast on public airwaves within certain frequencies. The reason for this is that those frequences are not unlimited. In fact, they're quite limited. So they are a public trust and must be regulated by the government. Don't like it? Go invent something better.
RP
Spectrum regulation does not have to be all-or-nothing. There can be heavily regulated sections and non-regulated sections (as long as you broadcast within the specified non-regulated range).
Some applications of radio/TV/ephones work better for pre-defined bands and some work better under free-for-all.
Let's have ranges set aside for some of each and let the market-place decide which they will choose.
Table-ized A.I.
Let me explain. It was an argument used to discredit the idea of collective ownership and control of resources. The parable goes, villagers had a common plot of land that everyone could graze their animals on. No one person stood to benefit from conserving, so everyone overgrazed the common land. Contrast that to private ownership: where one person owns the land, they benefit more by not overgrazing.
The people who held the land in common were just DUMB! Plenty of societies manage public resources well. Fire departments, police, roads, and parks, for example. Plenty of private owners utterly destroy the resource they own, simply taking the profits and moving on to exploit someplace else. The poor schmucks with the common grazing land were DOUBLY DUMB if they bought the rich guy's story and let him buy all their publicly held resources out from under them. I know our city zoo has gone to absolute hell after they privatized it. Try getting water in the third world from the newly privatized systems. Tragedy of the commons, my ass. Tragedy of overprivatization and lack of accountability is more like it.
But hey, at least this rich guy used a story. Throughout most of history they have simply used goons.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton