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Another View of the FCC and Spectrum Scarcity
Bob_Robertson writes "Tim Swanson on the Ludwig von Mises Institute site is asking, has the FCC put itself out of a job by allowing the 47-49 MHz, 2.4 GHZ and other "open spectrum" frequencies, thus focusing innovation and development into making fantastic use of limited resources? The basis of the FCC's existence is "scarcity", so what happens when there isn't any scarcity any more? LVMI has looked into the FCC before."
FDR's Thought Police: Still Alive, Still Censoring
Ever seen the amounts of FCC fines?
-mkb
It is largely a regulatory agency there to ensure that the spectrums don't get abused and misused.
It was largely that.
Now it's the branch of government in charge of enforcing "clean language" by protecting us from hearing any of seven unmentionable words.
Odd things can happen, and if the application is mission critical, it will likely fail.
The only reason we do things via the license free band is because of the fact, that it is, free.
I bet for most of us, if we had to pay $$$ to use our own private wireless networks (licensing) the popularity would have never been as high as it is.
For instance, FRS are relatively new frequencies for us to use. It has only been recently that we can use these (approx) 460Mhz radio spectrum with out a license.
Anyone who uses FRS knows that in a city all of the channels can be congested. This is the reason why mission critical services (like police, airport, etc) pay for 'private' spectrum. These organizations usually have access to big money, hence the reason why it is big money to purchase spectrum.
It costs way more to buy digital spectrum than analogue/narrow channel/voice/digital voice/low-speed spectrum.
I think in Canada to buy a 10khz wide VHF or UHF piece of the spectrum, say for a few mobiles with in a 25 km distance is only a few thousand a year. Where large (say 24mhz wide) microwave allocations get auctioned for millions of dollars.
In the past, scarcity may have been a money maker for the FCC. These days I think they're in the censorship business.
Oh yes, positively laid to waste. Thats why my cordless phone makes my Wifi slow down, not to mention the interference issues you get in higher-rent appartment buildings were everyone has a WAP...
Why?
So far it looks like the FCC's current regulation of radio frequencies is: 1) Make it impossible for small radio stations to exist on the FM band. 2) Make it easy for Mega-conglomerates to control all broadcasts on the FM band. 3) See above rules and swap FM for whatever band you are talking about. The reality is a pretty grim one. The FCC hasn't opened the small footprint radio station applications in many years, so smaller voices are not being given the opportunity to speak. I do not however think that the FCC should be shut down. The FCC needs to be about seeing that access to means of communication is not monopolized by a few commercial interests. What the FCC, and their "sponsors" don't seem to understand is that competition really is good for everybody.
I'm a happy pessimist. I expect and prepare for the worst, when it doesn't happen I am pleasantly surprised.
Then again, so many of us want the kind of "cradle-to-grave" care our government has evolved into providing.
That phrase alone tells me you're not American. In the US, many millions of people are left without medical coverage, the poor with sub-poverty-level food assistance, if not simply left to starve. In the middle-class sections of US society, most pay private medical insurances. As for the rich and very rich, they're the ones taken care of by the government really well, in the form of huge tax breaks.
If any modern society doesn't have a "cradle-to-grave" state, it's the US. Look at Sweden and you'll know what a true one is.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Seriously, it's a bad article that is not well thought out.
Considering if I pick up my 2.4Ghz telephone to take a call, it completely whacks out my 802.11 wireless internet signal... It doesn't seem at all clear to me that scarcity of the frequency was created by the FCC. Rather it was the FCC which was created to manage the already existing reality.
Now it's true that the FCC has gone beyond the boundaries of what otherwise rationale people would consider prudent. But that's not the focal point of this article.
> Exposing kids to everything allows them to become well-rounded
> adults who are aware of everything.
You didn't have to say you weren't actually a parent, that boneheaded remark was enough to tell everyone that you not only aren't one, you have zero experience with them and that you probably had a screwed up childhood yourself, so you have no reference points. Hell, you have probably never even had to teach an adult anything if you can make that statement.
Yes, children need to be exposed to all sorts of things if they are to become responsible citizens when they grow up. But at the appropriate time. Children AREN'T just small adults. The higher reasoning skills take time to develop. Some concepts need to be taught after others are fully understood.
Example. C wouln't exactly be the first choice to teach someone to program who had never done any codeing at all, but a teacher doing so would be merely odd who did so. (Might be trying a radical new technique.) But if that teacher then extected said student to figure out the hairier bits of pointers in the first week they would be zarking mad.
Same with kids. Advanced concepts in love/romance/sexuality/relationships can't be properly understood without a good foundation in both teaching and experience dealing with simpler relationships among family and friends. Not to mention that their hardware isn't properly configured (both the obvious physical changes to the external hardware and the ones you obviously have no concept of in the ol wetware) until fairly close to the modern legal adult line. Most of the readers here on slashdot, hell the whole world, are adults still trying to figure this stuff out, expecting a five year old to understand is just idiocy.
Democrat delenda est
Although some of the comments here have been intelligent and made with understanding of economics, many of them have been socialist and interventionist nonsense. Hence, I'd like to offer a broad, but brief, response.
The argument by many here seems to run something like the following: The spectrum is scarce, relative to the demand for it; therefore, the government should regulate it. This is simply nonsense. It is precisely when things are scarce that we most need private property rights in them. How would these rights be acquired? By homesteading the relevant portion of the spectrum. Of course, what constitutes "homesteading" a certain frequency is a continuum problem -- clearly, simply spewing out junk on it doesn't constitute homesteading it. One has to actually be making a real use of it.
In a For a New Liberty , Murray N. Rothbard, argued that we don't need State-intervention in the spectrum. See Personal Liberty: Freedom of Radio and Television . Contrary to the commonly held but mistaken view, there was not chaos in the spectrum before the FCC was created to intervene in it. Instead, things were working quite efficiently as courts recognized private property rights in spectrum homesteaded by different individuals. As Rothbard states, the belief that there was chaos prior to State-regulation of the spectrum is
As B.K. Marcus has noted, this account is supported by the memoirs of Herbert Hoover, who noted that One of our troubles in getting legislation [to nationalize the airwaves] was the very success of the voluntary system we had created. I would highly recommend reading the historical overview of the spectrum given by Marcus. Marcus argues that, in order to get support for legislation regulating the spectrum, Hoover purposefully created spectrum-socialism, granting licenses to all applications, free of price or restriction. This, of course, creates a tragedy of the commons.
What we need isn't regulation of the spectrum. Rather, we need deregulation and privatization (via homesteading) of the spectrum. Common law is perfectly capable of applying existing property-rights conventions to the spectrum, including accounting for interference (which would be analagous to building a mineshaft 2 feet under someone elses' house, hence causing it to collapse).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I'm a little bit confused by the story leader. It doesn't appear to be a coherent sentence. I presume it means that the FCC should allow those bands to be used by unregulated transmitters.
It is true that if all players work on a common form of time-division multiplexing that the number of transmitters can scale very widely, but there is nothing magical about these bands (other than them being wide -- much wider than, say, AM or FM broadcast bands). Transmitters will interfere with one another. Poorly designed or built transmitters will radiate out of band. Intermodulation will occur, causing out of band interference.
The FCC may or may not be the best regulator, but someone has to resolve the disputes, and I guess I'd rather it was through regulation than through lawsuits (which would happen in the absence of regulation, I guarantee it).
It isn't just a liberal phenomenon either: my wife served (in an extremely lowly capacity) in the Reagan administration for a while, and the period was remarkable for the rate at which government and the various private entities that feed off of it grew.
Milton Friedman says that during Reagan's reign, government socialist activity dropped. Link here.