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Does OSS Make The FCC Irrelevant?
JordanL writes "Daniel Fisher over at Forbes.com wonders whether or not OSS makes the FCC irrelevant. From the article: 'The agency might have made sense in the 1920s, Moglen says, when it was formed to assign specific frequencies to broadcasters so they wouldnt try to drown each other out by cranking up the transmitter power. But a new generation of intelligent radios, combined with equally clever computer networks, is making it possible for anybody to use the airwaves without interfering with anybody else.'"
Yeah right. If I go by your same logic and just for the sake of argument let us also assume that Napster was Open Source. Do you really think RIAA still wouldn't have crushed it? First Amendment my ass. Our "friendly" (and genius) lawmakers will find a loophole or make a law that First Amendment will violate. Yup the greenback has a voice, and it is fuckin' loud!
The FCC does more than just assign people radio waves.
If patriotism is racist, is racism patriotic?
...as long as they can make tons of money divvying up the frequency spectrum. For example, they're drooling over the eventual switch from analog to digital TV. The amount of cash they'll make off the range of analog TV frequencies will be huge.
The above comment shows an unfortunate lack of understanding if what the FCC does, and bandwidth allocation is only a small part of it. What would you do when someone builds a computer controlled spark gap (substitute in approbiate technological device), and proceeds to jam every frequency they can. Without enforcement, how is anyone going to be able to exchange meaninful content?
Perhaps we should just boycott Forbes until they get rid of Dan Lyons. Obviously, Forbes can't tell the difference between real journalism, and some sort of PR hack.
Do we have a cite for this? It sounds bogus. Moglen is smarter than that.
I agree with the article somewhat- OSS and software-tuneable packet-based radios will eventually push wireless bandwidth to unimagineably high levels. It will also make the FCC obsolete because the software will essentially be doing the same job as the FCC- negotiating for free open bandwidth.
But we ain't there yet- and given my history with used radios and TVs, and the current hassle over HDTV broadcast, I'd say we're at least 40, perhaps 50 years away from this becoming nationwide reality; and at least 100 years before it becomes worldwide reality.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
What do you think all your internet connections are running on? Wireless radio spectrums and cable lines.
Because if people can do whatever they want, some will be assholes. It is much easier to get high bandwidth long range transmission by using a lot of power and a wide frequency band than it is to do it with low power and creative encoding, so people will do just that. We need regulation to ensure that everyone plays nice. Perhaps not how it is now, but an unregulated spectrum wouldn't work out well and, as always, it'd be the little guy getting the biggest shaft.
While better encodings might make it possible for multiple signals to exist without interference, that doesn't mean thatthe FCC isn't necessary. The day that we see megabroadcasters fire up a gigawatt transmiter that plasters a broadband range with religious TV broadcasting across the entire country, you'll understand the problem. Not everything can practically switch to frequency hopping. In particular, anything based on broadcast concepts cannot do so because otherwise clients can't reasonably locate it.
Moreover, even frequency hopping requires a fixed frequency starting point in at least one direction in order to get communication started in the first place. At the very least, the FCC is necessary in order to prevent those frequencies from getting trampled upon.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
OSS also makes banks, rainy days, and the patriarchy irrelevant!
It's just like how communism has made government irrelevant in the workers' pardises of Cuba and North Korea!
Spark Gap Generators are not fun
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or, that's the way that it currently is. Never has government been ideal.
The FCC is still needed. There is still a finite set of bandwidth available. Technology may allow more and more things to utilize that bandwidth but there are limits. And if it is unregulated then the most powerful transmitter wins will be the way it works. This would result in areas where lower power devices would not be able to operate because someone is splattering the spectrum those devices use with their own noise.
:)
Actually it might not be bad if you could walk/drive around with a cell phone jammer. Or even better a high frequency Ham radio that can cause that rolling speaker that pulled up next to you some serious interference directly into the speakers.
Just need enough power to permanetly damage his speakers with one ear shattering squelch!
If we were a nation of boy scouts that might work, but experience in wireless band usage in the unlicensed ranges indicates this is not the case
Unlicensed wireless spectrum in Omaha, Nebraska, population 500k, is managed by a mixture of microwave design and troubleshooting, back stabbing, jamming with amateur gear, intrusions into ISP's networks, 'uncoordinated' adjustments of competitor's antennas and radios in shared facilities, lawsuits, character assassination, 'testing' of heavily amplified frequency hopping products, and occasional play on the part of aircrews on RC-135 Rivet Joints flying out of Offutt AFB.
Never in a million billion zillion years would the licensed band network operators here tolerate that sort of conduct. Eben needs to stick to software licenses and leave radio physics alone
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
The FCC does far more than just regulate the airwaves. They also regulate satellite TV, cable companies, cell phone companies, and phone companies. They also provide the National Do-Not-Call list, and regulate telemarketers. They regulate and monitor 911 services. They fine the phone companies when there are major outages, making sure the phone companies do a decent job even though they have a near monopoly in their geographic areas.
If you can show me open source software, or closed source software for that matter, that can do ALL of the above, then I'll agree. Perhaps the FCC just needs to be reduced in size and scope, just like every other government organization.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
...ooooh short answer yes with an if, long answer no with a but...
But a new generation of intelligent radios, combined with equally clever computer networks, is making it possible for anybody to use the airwaves without interfering with anybody else.
Yeah, that's possible. It's also possible that I want to set up a huge-ass transmitter and saturate the neighborhood with radio waves. The type of thinking that's expressed in the summary assumes that everybody -- not "most people", but everybody -- will act ethically, at least in a utilitarian or "common good" sense. I say 'everybody' because (as many of us know) it only takes on rogue transmitter to pooch things up real good.
Don't get me wrong, a world in which everybody works together without regulation would be nice, but it's a fundamental problem of ethics.
Sony ha
The FCC has never been anything but a drag on freedom, economic prosperity and technical innovation.
Without the FCC, companies would have created new technologies earlier to deal with the technical problems of a free-for-all airspace. There would have been less interference in corporate affairs (providing greater economic prosperity), and far greater freedom (no decency laws limiting speech).
Look around at other government agencies (other than the core responsibilities in millitary, judicial and police functions), and you'll see much the same story.
"a new generation of intelligent radios, combined with equally clever computer networks, is making it possible for anybody to use the airwaves without interfering with anybody else" You're kidding, right? Look at what a mess the 2.4ghz band is. Every cordless phone and nonstandard wireless protocol device (wireless TV repeater from radio shack, etc.) uses it along with 802.11. I run into interference conflicts frequently enough that I still keep my networks wired whenever possible unless it's a laptop. Letting people blast away at 200mw is bad enough, imagine the mess that'll ensue if you do that with higher power transmitters.
There is only so much bandwidth in the radio spectrum. In signal theory, the bandwidth of an analog channel is pretty well defined: it's log(S/N)(fmax). That is to say, it's the logarithm of the signal-to-noise ratio, multiplied by the maximum number of samples per second you can send. The S/N logarithm determines how many bits you can commmunicate with each sample of the channel; the fmax determines how many samples per second you can transmit.
The current FCC strategy for allocating bandwidth is to let the natural background S/N dominate, and allocate pieces of frequency spectrum. The UWB strategy is to increase N over the entire frequency spectrum. They both consume bandwidth in the public airwaves. Remember, unless you're using angular encoding (like a camera) there is only one signal to be had: the voltage off an antenna, versus time. Traditional radio broadcasting uses the Fourier basis to describe that voltage signal and to cut up pieces of the signal for different people to use. CDMA, TDMA, and other WB strategies use different bases -- the effect is that their interference is spread over a LOT of Fourier space, so no one user affects any one channel more than infinitesimally.
But there's no free lunch. A zillion users, all degrading signal infinitesimally, are just as bad as a single doofus who's stomping on your allocated frequency band. Even worse, actually, because you can (usually) find and unplug the doofus's equipment -- but nothing short of a nuclear strike will stop the UWB interference once it gets bad.
That raises the question of why Rupert Murdoch, say, needs exclusive access to a slice of the radio spectrum for his Fox television network when he could just as easily put his content out over the Internet for customers to pick up using low-powered wi-fi receivers hooked into the Web.
So his argument is that because stations can send out information over the internet, TV is obsolete? There's at least one problem here. Aside from the necessary internet bandwidth required, not everyone has a computer/good enough computer/internet connection/broadband internet connection. Additionaly, the bandwidth necessary to send out a TV program at equivalent quality to what is on TV has barely made it to most homes. Even my 5mbit cable modem would be too low a bitrate for some programs. Not to mention the new HDTV is going to be 20 mbits. People want to watch in real time, not download and then watch.
Then there are the non-TV usages for satelites, which hapens to be covered under the FCC as well. Last I checked we still had some places in the US that are on party lines, and some don't even have phone service yet, and he expects them to have internet?.
As for "inteligent radios" and such, I'd like to see them work in an area where someone is blasting out there own multi megawatt signal.
Gah, there are so many things that the FCC currently does I can't even list them all.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
The FCC is necessary but they aren't doing what they should. The best example I can give is the FCC's deregulation of radio in the late ninties. In the markets near me, Clear Channel bought every station and left radio in a sad state.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
"...GNU Radio is developing a new generation of radios and TV receivers that use software for just about everything except the antenna and the power source. The FCC can prohibit manufacturers from selling radios that transmit on illegal frequencies, but it would have trouble shutting down a Web site distributing software that does the same thing."
Look dude, I just got a brand GNU radio!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
" a new generation of intelligent radios, combined with equally clever computer networks,"
there are radios and computer networks which aren't OSS... maybe it should be is new technology making the fcc irrelevant?
It would hurt Jesus if your child heard the word "cunt" on the tele or radio. That is why it is strictly forbidden in the God-loving America.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
The FCC doesn't drool over any allocation. Commercial interests may drool over getting to divvy up frequencies but that's why we have and need a regulatory agency.
What would prevent the kiddie down the street from buying a 1000 watt transmitter, radiating himself and his neighbors, overmodulating his signal and washing out half the FM radio spectrum within a nearby radius?
There is no way to mandate computer networked transmitters, or to enforce things from the transmitter side.
The fcc handles figuring out land topology, power, assignments, and a myriad other factors involved in assigning a frequency and maximum power- for the entire country's radio space over several ghz of spectrum.
What does open source really have to do with this anyway? Sure, open source could theoretically implement the system he talks about, but the post is more about the supposed irrelevance of the fcc and is using OSS as a buzzword to generate hype.
"The FCC can prohibit manufacturers from selling radios that transmit on illegal frequencies, but it would have trouble shutting down a Web site distributing software that does the same thing."
Hmm, I have a hard time believing our government would have trouble shutting down anything. The FCC has been able to put the squeeze on just about anyone and anything they feel like that is even remotly involved in the transmission of "communications"
--Insert profound quote here.
You've got to be kidding me, I stood in the parking lot after a football game on Saturday and tried to call the same person 65 times before getting through. I would love to know where these super-intelligent networks are, because I wasn't near one yesterday.
While the job the FCC has been doing is certainly debatable (although not necessarily debate worthy), the fact that they do provide some form of regulation is good. Even if everyone can adapt their radio to work at other frequencies:
A. we are a long way from having adaptive radios in everything, it would cost sooo much to update all radios, even over the next 20 years - it wouldn't quite be as bad as the U.S. converting to metric, but someone has not thought this through entirely. Think the U.S. is going to go metric in the next 20 years? I don't.
B. there is no enforcement - people can create malicious noise and you have no legal (non-vigilante) way to get them to stop.
The GPL does not prohibit the sale of OSS - it prohibits hiding the source code from whomever the binaries are distributed to.
Looks like someone forgot to check at least one fact...
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
Get rid of the FCC so I can put a transmitter in the trunk of my car that is set to the same frequency as the local country station. This way I could drive around and jam the station with an endless loop of "Tooling for Anus" by The Meatmen.
That would rock!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Sure, it is possible to regulate radio equipment using OSS to use finer and finer pieces of spectrum. That's really irrelevant. If I decide I want to use 97.111 MHz for my open-source-audio-blog, and the local radio station wants to use 97.111 MHz for teeny-bop-around-the-clock and Motorola wants to use 97.111 MHz for emergency radios, who gets to use that frequency? The FCC's role is critical to keeping the airwaves organized and prioritized. No matter how thin you slice the bandwith someone has to make the call to say "you use 97.111 - you use 97.113 - you use 97.115".
The other piece the FCC provides is the concept of licensing for the sake of assigning priority on a frequency. If one party interferes with another, who wins? FCC defines those priorities clearly.
If the FCC were not there, any venture onto the airwaves would be a crap-shoot of whether anything is there or not, like SETI. With the FCC in place I know I will get teeny-bop-around-the clock at 97.1MHz, 2M Ham Radio at 146.720MHz, and if I run my RC car at 37MHz it won't interrupt my WiFi connection at 2.4GHz.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Here's a very informative statement by Kennard about the FCC status in 1998... It helps us see where we are now came to be.
s 2005.html
http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/0610ken.pdf
Kennard maintained that the purpose of the FCC was to promote competition and UNiversal Access (both to telephone and internet).
So what happened to the FCC? Why does the FCC still want to regulate radio transmissions, when as TFA points out, there is no appreciable limit to transmission based on frequency?
Well, Kennard resigned in 2001. Succeeding him were Michael Powell and Kevin Martin. Most of us know what Powell gave us, but here's a link to Martin's public statements since his appointment:
http://www.fcc.gov/commissioners/martin/statement
Not too much mention about competition there. Nor about USF, other than instigating inquiries. So what exactly is the FCC mission under Martin?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The hard quote here is this:
"My goal is to do all of the work it takes to be explaining to the Supreme Court in 2025 why broadcasting is unconstitutional," says Moglen, who speaks in perfect, rolling sentences. "We have a long march to do, we have a lot of education to do, society has to catch up with our vision of the future, but we are going someplace and the only question is timing and skill in driving."
Which first of all, implies he wants deregulation of broadcasting by 2025 and second of all implies that broadcasting is all he cares about, not, say, FCC regulations on interference caused by computer power supplies. Extremely hard to say with no context other than Forbes' interpretation.
There doesn't appear to be any source that puts his words in context. Other articles are appearing now on ZDnet, et al, but they only cite Forbes.
I don't think this is even remotely an accurate statement of Eben Moglen's ideas. Not to be an apologist; I think deregulation broadcasting is a stupid idea. I wouldn't mind seeing the airwaves repartioned to give more space over to public use, etc., but simple deregulation I wouldn't support. However, I strongly suspect Forbes of putting words in Moglen's mouth with its interpretation of whatever he actually said.
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
First, the purpose of organisms like USA's FCC goes beyond atributing slices of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Second, the problem of interference between independent systems sharing the same medium hasn't been really solved.
What you have, in things like WiFi, are systems that have a finite capabiliy to co-exist with other independent systems and therefore, are allowed to be operated without a licence.
But that co-existence depends on some rules and one of the tasks of organizations like FCC is to define and enforce those rules.
One of those rules in particular requires attention too: maximum radiated power. Because these systems have a finite capability to co-exist without disrupting each others and because every citizen has the right to have it's own system, the rules end up putting harsh limits on the area they can cover, by restricting the maximum power they are allowed to radiate.
This is the old cell phone paradigm: Need to support more clients on a given area? Reduce the power on the cells and install more cells on the area.
These legal limitations on power make systems on open spectrum unsuitable or less usefull for many aplications. For those applications, you need to give them a chunk of spectrum where they can put as much power as they need without the worry of hurting anyone else.
Thats grasping at straws trying to link OSS and radio and freedom. Its just a silly connection to make, unless you're a mindless OSS fanboi.
Seriously. If you think the FCC's role is not an important one, you don't understand some combination of: human nature, radio communications, electronics, telecommunications history, etc. I'm sure others can come up with more broad areas believing that shows a lack of understanding in.
And trying to pass off the "OSS means freedom" argument really sends things into left field.
Ms. Jones and Mr. Moglen refute the Forbes piece
No way, Ho-Zay!
Agencies are never abolished just because they are obsolete, the same way laws are never repealed just because they are obsolete.
You just get more laws and more agencies.
It's the law.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
All information broadcast wirelessly requires some finite bandwidth and power. Two transmitters broadcasting in the same space at the same time can jam each other. Someone needs to enforce rules and specifications about how transcevers interoperate, whether broadcast, pont to point, or whatever. Otherwise, incompatible technologies will interfere with each other. Also, what's to stop someone from taking huge chunks of bandwdith for square miles without a regulating agency?
Vote for Pedro
I'll have to consult the archives on this one.
You see, without regulation there would be no power limits. Without power limits it would be a short race to see who could have the biggest gun, er, transmitter. You would be able to pick up their transmissions on your cell phone, your car radio, your TV, your wired telephone and just about every other electronic device. Maybe a few that aren't all that electronic because things act strangely when there is enough power being broadcast.
I guess this guy's idea of "free speech" would include making sure the folks in India could pick up AM radio stations in the US.
It might be interesting to live in a completely unregulated, libertarian paradise. Unfortunately, what this guy is proposing is just eliminate the regulations without any other disincentives. He didn't think it through.
YES! The FCC became an annacronism the instant it became feasable to transmit audio over the Internet. Their continued existence only serves to slow down whatever progress the industry can make.
I have no tag line
... then what's up with microwave ovens and 802.11b routers? And 2.4 GHz phones?
Never mistake "can" for "should".
The article implies that if everyone has a radio that can broadcast on any frequency (via the magic of OSS), then it can't be regulated. And they can't stop anyone from having the radio, because the software will be GPLd.
Sorry, kids, but we're talking about a finite resource here. Frequencies aren't virtual, there is no magic multiplexer that will let everyone share the same bandwidth. Just imagine if someone wrote an Ethernet card driver that didn't respect the Ethernet protocol: that one card would monopolize the whole network. Hell, the FCC is already prosecuting people who don't respect the current band allocations, see here. Some people think that because they have a ham license and a 1000W amp they can broadcast whatever and whenever they want. Imagine what the situation will be like when anybody can get a radio and a 1000W (or more) amp. What's to stop people from having several radios and broadcasting on several frequencies at once? Or to stop some script kiddie from writing a simple loop to broadcast "I 4M 31337!!!1!!" starting at 50MHz and moving up 1MHz a step?
I'm with the economists one this one -- everyone is bad until proven otherwise.
Just junk food for thought...
"There is still a finite set of bandwidth available." Clarification: saying that there is a shortage of radio spectrum is like saying there is a shortage of colors. Both are infinite. Colors become finite only when you restrict yourself to a discrete color-space, like a box of Crayola crayons. Radio spectrum becomes finite only when you chop it into big discrete chunks, like radio stations. Reference, for example, http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/199507/msg00023.html, as well as numerous other discussions along the same lines. Radio bands are as big as they are only because early 20th century vacuum tube technology required them to be. Modern microlectronics could allow modern radio bands to be however "skinny" we like.
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
What's to stop that child now? If he really wanted to do so, he could obtain such equipment today, just as he could without the FCC.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Quote #1: "...the General Public License, a subversive bit of lawyering that turns property law on its head by prohibiting the users of open-source software from charging money for it."
f o/CompanyTearsheet.jhtml?tkr=APA to the Apache web server!
There is nothing in the GPL that prohibits people from charging money for GPL software. See Red Hat, Novell, IBM, et al.
Fuck-up #2: Linking http://www.forbes.com/finance/mktguideapps/compin
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
What about the house committee on unamerican activities?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Except, of course, those who WANT to interfere for negative purposes.
You can flood a bandwidth with noise, and make it unusable. I don't care how much coding you use. There is no magical way to have infinite bandwidth across any portion of the spectrum.
All you'll wind up with is rich script kiddies (ham kiddies?) with klystron transmitters in their attic that papa bought them with petty cash from the trust fund.
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: No, of course not.
As the FCC moves more towards law enforcement, and censorship, they really have little to do with conflicts anymore.
/in solviet russia, your radio transissions police you.
//ducks
It provides a place to put political appointees to push somebody's moral agenda to get a few votes from stupid fundamentalists and idiotic parents.
"We're not limiting free speech. You just can't say certain things on the radio".
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Except OSS is written by ZEALOT MONKEY FAGGOTS. and the FCC is run by RETARDED MORONIC BEAUROCRATS. Uh, nope, no connection. Most important, however, is that OSS zealots have their mouth's WRAPPED AROUND WHOREVALD'S COCK!
Full Consumer Choice..
See, it won't be irrelevant...
The key to your comment is this :
..."
" Never in a million billion zillion years would the licensed band network operators here tolerate that sort of conduct. Eben needs to stick to software licenses and leave radio physics alone
I.E. the corporations who shelled out big bucks and have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, as opposed to the startups or hacker in his garage who did not.
Solution: one set of rules for analog broadcast and a more open set of rules for packet broadcast. E.G. any type of gear certified to do packet broadcast can be used without jumping through alot of hoops.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Individual rights make the FCC irrelevant, null, and void.
"Money is the barometer of a society's virtue." - Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged
But a new generation of intelligent radios, combined with equally clever computer networks, is making it possible for anybody to use the airwaves without interfering with anybody else.'"
And the fact that we have laws means we never need police.
I guess the author never heard a psycho CB operator talk about killing and raping everybody he meets (perhaps running a few hundred watts) or a schizo amateur operator running his VFO back and forth over people he disagrees with or somebody intentionally or unintentionally interfering with aircraft.
There is more in the airwaves than wi fi and TV.
...'cause the FCC is going to do everything it can to remain on the public's payroll. There's too much at stake for them -- to wit, all their jobs.
Kinda like the DEA: a complete and utter failure by every conceivable measure, yet they still suck bajillions of dollars out of the taxpayers' pockets.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I realize that this is Slashdot, but how is it *offtopic* to ask for some substantiation of an over-the-top article on Forbes?
Anyhow, there's an article on this over on Groklaw, but it doesn't go into anything about the FCC bit that I could see, and it looks like there are a number of facts they got wrong.
OSS can't censor out Janet Jackson's left boob, only the FCC can.
Clearly you do not know what you are talking about. Otherwise, you'd know it was her right boob that we saw.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
The FCC isn't that active in cracking down on annoying emitters, but they do try. This went out on August 24th:
"The Federal Communications Commission has been made aware that an electronic transformer manufactured by W.A.C. Lighting Company, model number EN-12PX-AR, located in a lighting circuit at your residence, is causing harmful radio interference to the AM Radio Broadcast Band as well as to a licensee in the Amateur Radio Service."
People tend to forget that a switching power supply is a high-powered RF generator. If it weren't for strict emissions regulations and type approval, the frequencies below a few megahertz would be full of power supply hash and not much else.
The real question is why was the FCC created in the first place and why should it still exist?
Who is protecting whose rights/interests? (Think people with power.)
The following article highlights the history behind the creation of the FCC.
If you have the time I think most will benefit from its insights.
I know I did.
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1662
It is long but an enjoyable piece.
The reason people can make such profoundly ignorant statements as "The FCC is obsolete", is precisely because the FCC has done a pretty darn good job of doing it's job. The FCC, at least in terms of frequency regulation and enforcement, has done a good enough job that they are largely invisible to the general public. Hence, a lot of people might think they are irrelevant.
Let me explain: the reason we are getting technology to make ever-more-efficient use of available radio spectrum, is in part due to the fact that the FCC, the ITU, and all the counterpart communications agencies of governments around the world recognized the need to regulate the radio spectrum, to slice it up for use by many different 'users'. Part of the FCC's job is to make sure the USA abides by the international radio-spectrum treaties, so that a resource that is fairly scarce, can have optimal usage.
These regulatory agencies, by the very work they do, encourage maximum usage of the available spectrum, and keep people from stepping on each other's signals. This is why we live in a world of wireless devices, wireless digital communications, cell phones, amateur radio, marine radio, military radio, tv, commercial radio, etc, etc and everyone can make use of the airwaves with minimal interference to each other. Once allocations have been made, you need someone to do enforcement (investigation and prosecutions of violations of the allotment), or else the allocations mean nothing.
If you got rid of the FCC, some people would stop playing nice with each other (even though the technology exists to co-exist). Some people would get frequency 'greedy'. And then the whole system would collapse. The sad thing about humans is, a certain percentage of the population always need 'police' to keep them honest (and some are crooked anyway, but at least you have a chance to stop them before they do too much damage, if you have police).
Another important thing to remember about radio frequency, is that different radio frequencies *behave differently*, and allocations need to take this into account (and currently, largely do). Shortwave radio allows worldwide communication with relatively low power output. But, because it is world-wide, it means you also have a truly global 'collision domain', to borrow a term from digital networking. So, if you just need to do local communications, you *don't* use these 'global' frequencies.
The FCC provides a truly useful service to the public (despite all the snarking about decency standards - something the FCC doesn't really want to be involved in, but is forced to by public demand, btw - remember, the FCC ultimately answers to politicians, whose chief concern is keeping the most people 'happy' so they can get re-elected). Let's give them a little respect.
Likewise, there is still rent-control in New York City -- introduced as a temporary measure during World War II (to protect the families of the soldiers from "greedy landlords", you see).
The Spanish War took place more than a century ago, but we are still paying the tax introduced to finance it.
Relevant my behind... FCC will stay with us for the forever, especially with its newfound purpose of censoring profanity et al.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
While it is interesting to discuss whether there is constitutional basis for the F.C.C. to exist, it is a gross oversimplification to represent the F.C.C. as being needed, or not, only for it's function in moderating interference problems. The manner in which broadcast stations are operated has far reaching implications in the areas of public safety, public education, public health, public purchasing behavior, political decisions and more.
The F.C.C.'s failure to see that broadcasters properly carry out the role as trustees of the public interest is behind much of the mess we have in U.S. politics. By allowing broadcasters to sell political advertising the media have become a crucial paid-for component in the corruption of the U.S. elections process. Not only is public opinion subject to being warped by misleading ads. Our elected officials frequently have to sell out in order to raise the funds used in political advertising. We cannot expect those in office to enact meaningful campaign spending reforms when it could mean cutting their own funds. Instead, we should have an F.C.C. that prevents broadcasters from accepting any political revenue. If broadcasters had to provide free time and ONLY free time to all legally validated candidates and measures, there would be far less motivation to seek or accept funding from the wrong places.
Perhaps if all Slashdotters in the U.S. wrote and visited their local stations and insisted that paid advertising was a key element in the corruption of our political process, it could be added to the quarterly lists of community issues that stations address with their programming. Letters to the stations, with copies to the F.C.C., should point out that carrying paid political ads is a FAILURE to address a serious community issue. If there were enough written public outcry licenses could be challenged at renewal time.
OSS doesn't have a damned thing to do with it. The change that has come, is that part of the radio spectrum (e.g. the part used by 802.11) is used in such a general way (passing abstract packets) that any application can be run on it, and they can all run at the same time.
What this does, is that it makes it so that there is no need to give monopolies for parts of the spectrum. We don't need the FCC to regulate communication, we need to it regulate against jamming communication. Even Moglen's going to be miffed when someone's microwave oven keeps him from communicating, whether that's to download gcc or to get today's programming by Murdoch.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The agency might have made sense in the 1920s, Moglen says, when it was formed to assign specific frequencies to broadcasters so they wouldnt try to drown each other out by cranking up the transmitter power
That is one of the functions performed by the FCC, although other mechanisms certainly would have taken care of that if the FCC had not. The FCC's powers went far beyond that. Congress nationalized the spectrum and took upon itself the authority to grant revocable licenses that must be used "in the public interest". Surely at this remove, we needn't parrot the simplistic grade-school excuse that was fed to the masses. Obviously, states like to control communications, and ours was no exception.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Tell that to my microwave.
Clones are people two.
There's more to it but I am ranting so I'll stop. Bottom line, IMHO, is that Eben maybe does not know as much as he should about radio frequencies before he spouts off about it but this Dan Fisher fellow at Forbes needs to be cracked a few times with a clue stick before he writes another article on anything remotely related to F/OSS.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
can deliberately mess up anything. You'd need some kind of mechism to deal with them. When email was first created, if you had asked anyone whether we needed goverment regulation of email, they would have said no. Spammers changed that.
Anybody notice how the article featured a hyperlink for more info on Apache. Did you click it? (G)
Columbia Law School Professor Eben Moglen is a total FOOL.
He's so out of touch with the reality of broadcasting, that he seems to believe that ALL broadcasters can afford to just buy new equipment
The USA has many broadcasters in rural areas who just can't afford to change their kit.
What a DICK!.
While the electromagnetic spectrum is in theory infinite, the physically usable spectrum is finite.
We have at most 20-24 GHz of economically usable bandwidth. For some applications (point-to-multipoint broadcast), LOS restrictions and the difficulty of generating appreciable amounts of power at higher microwave frequencies limits us to far less than that.
Honestly, the only economical transceivers I know of that work above the 5.8 GHz ISM band are specialty devices not well suited to communications. (Gunn diode and magnetron sources at 10 GHz and 24 GHz. Good for radar, not good for communications due to large amounts of noise and frequency drift.) Generating more than a few milliwatts above 5.8 GHz is HARD and expensive! To handle high power, an amplifying device (i.e. transistor) must be large, but at microwave frequencies, the device size is a more significant portion of the wavelength of the frequency to be amplified. Developing more than a watt or so at 2.4 GHz and above requires either hundreds of dollars, or specialty vacuum tubes (magnetrons as used in microwave ovens, or traveling wave tubes.) Note that magnetrons are very noisy and unstable sources that are useless for all but Morse code communications.
Anyone who things the FCC can be made obsolete in less than 50-100 years is ignorant to the realities of communications systems and RF engineering. Software defined radios are a big step forward, but they're still best considered to be an infant technology. The only SDRs that are actually in use today are by people who ABSOLUTELY need the flexibility *at any cost* (read: military applications). Broadband RF design techniques and high-speed general-purpose DSPs needed for a flexible SDR designs exist, but both broadband RF design and high-speed general-purpose DSPs are EXPENSIVE.
Even 50-100 years from now, we're going to still need the FCC to make sure that people's SDRs play nicely with each other, otherwise (as a previous poster mentioned) someone will fire up a multi-kilowatt spark gap attached to a microcontroller and call it a "smart radio".
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If the FCC is gone, who will try to ensure that local loop prices do not go thru the roof once MCI/Verizon and ATT/SBC mergers are finalized?
I doubt that the author of the article has much of a clue about ANYTHING he wrote about and consequently distorted things so much that it is meaningless. It's probably a waste of time to discuss something that has been so horribly mangled because people are reacting to the author's errors.
As the parent comment notes, he mis-represented what OSS was. There were plenty of other obvious errors, but I'd like to suggest that even the title and basic thesis are in error because it's not really open source software that is the key factor, but rather, low power, distributed, frequency hopping, spread spectrum, mesh networks.
Heck, the guy even thinks that Apache is a mining company, so how reliable can the article be?
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
What the *!@#$^% does OSS have to do with FCC?
Sure there's no signal interference. Tell that to my wireless router when the neighbor's microwave turns on.
This is exactly the same as saying we don't need highway patrol any more because you reprogrammed you car's internal computer so... yeah, what actually?
Morevoer, the individual control and decentralization available by the Internet and digital technology means that the censoring of content can be put in the hands of individuals by the creation of filters. There's a real problem with the media content we have flying around these days. Sex and lust messages are laced into radio, splattered on billboards, streaming through the TV constantly. This is skewing children and we have no way to control it. It is unfair and unconstitutional to censor to the necessary degree through a government agency. The Internet and the technologies that are involved in this new decentralized digital media can be used to censor on an individual basis. Parents can regain control again over what their children are exposed to, and we can maintain a free-speech society.
The FCC should be finding ways to make its existence irrelevant, but we all know that the real mission of government agencies is to perpetuate themselves.
That only means the FCC did a damn fine job of censoring the left one!
While the airwaves are getting used more efficiently, the FCC is also responsible for other areas of spectrum management that aren't "computerized." For example, many portions of the spectrum are set aside for various types of civil and military radar. While radars are computer-controlled, I would NOT want my local air traffic controller to have to be sharing his spectrum with some junior wireless hacker.
On the other hand, if someone wants to design a system that interferes with the same portion of the spectrum used by police radar guns, I'm not going to complain.
The FCC remains very much needed, without the coordination of frequencies, you may not be able to listen to the radio in your car, whether it be Satellite radio or local broadcast. Also, if frequencies were not managed then everyone would be constantly interferring with each other, police etc. There is actually a larger demand for spectrum space now than ever, and therefore the FCC is needed more than ever. There are intelligent radios, one just developed at Virginia Tech, however when there is a huge spectrum, there needs to be some managment, and in this case managment is a good thing.
The FCC still has a useful role to play in setting standards.
However, they have become a force for censorship and actually limit access to media rather than enable more of it. It should be possible to get any channel from anywhere in the world, with good quality. There should also be thousands of TV and radio stations in every market, rather than the feeble number we have currently.
I remember fondly tuning in to my TRS-80 on the Radio, and then typing away hearing every key press changing the static.... for all of 60 seconds.... before turning the noise off...
While the airwaves are getting used more efficiently, the FCC is also responsible for other areas of spectrum management that aren't "computerized." For example, many portions of the spectrum are set aside for various types of civil and military radar. While radars are computer-controlled, I would NOT want my local air traffic controller to have to be sharing his spectrum with some junior wireless hacker.
True enough- but I imagine one day we'll be able to quite well using packet filtering. I know of at least one low-power radar system in use in the auto industry in Japan and the United States that uses this technique (each radar "ping" contains a 64 bit number- encoding the transmitter code and the time of transmission, making for a "smart ping" that contains all the information needed to figure out distance when it bounces back. Packets that have the wrong transmitter code are ignored).
On the other hand, if someone wants to design a system that interferes with the same portion of the spectrum used by police radar guns, I'm not going to complain.
Already exists but is illegal in most states. The states where it is legal are already using digital software packet rejection systems or laser range finders instead.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The FCC need not be abolished; its policies just need to change drastically. Whatever you may think of the censorship policies, spectrum usage rules will always be needed. It should be noted that while some radio technology is becoming more sophisticated (so that it can tolerate interference better, spacially direct transmissions, and cooperate with other devices), we can expect that certain technologies (e.g. analog radio on emergency frequencies) will have good reason not to change, and thus might continue to need the kind of protection that the FCC provides. Also, protection against jamming, excessive power use, and bad receivers (and non-radio devices) that cause interference, are still good things.
It seems to me that the author of TFA has confused a lot of things. Open source per se is not a threat to established broadcasters, but many new technologies (both open and closed, hardware and software) are eliminating the need for the traditional broadcasting model.
Contrary to the article, both developers and users can charge money for GPL software.
Great, that's all we need to do. Outlaw broadcasting, and force the FBI to crack down on all those pirate broadcasters with FM transmitters. Good Lord, I thought we wanted to expand low-power FM broadcasting, not outlaw it. And the War of Drugs seemed bad. Now Moglen wants a War of Broadcasters. lovely!
Websites, schmebsites. How's a website going to stop an FBI raid on your home because you are broadcasting illegally? This isn't about prohibiting manufacturers from selling transmitters that can tranmit on illegal frequencies, it would be about the consumers who broadcast on them. Getting something off of a website isn't going to keep the law off your back. Stomping on someone else's frequency isn't a first amendment right
That's what this is, isn't it? An attempt at some civil disobedience to destroy Fox. Ah, what a pleasant world Moglen fights for.
-BrentDitto FM and my musical tastes. Perhaps 10 megawatts ERP on a 14,000-foot mountain should let me indulge my musical meglamania. Heck, why not have several and blanket the West coast and the Rocky Mountain region? If I settle for lower mountains, the East coast is mine too. Round the clock Lawrence Welk for everyone!
As for WiFi, there's got to be a way a hunking big multi-megawatt radar magnatron could be properly pulsed for digital data. Get a 300-meter dish, point it at the moon, password protect it so nobody but me can have access, and I'll have WiFi over about 1/3 the planet. Of course, no one who's not at least 100 feet underground will have WiFi when I do, but what the heck.
Yes, I can see there are good reasons to end the FCC's interference with my royal prorogatives. As my wife Marie Antonette puts it, "Let the poor use cables."
Heavily shielded cables I might add.
--King Louis XIV, "The Spectrum, It is We"
It says that the GPL is "a subversive bit of lawyering that turns property law on its head by prohibiting the users of open-source software from charging money for it".
That, as anyone who is familiar with the GPL, and with RMS's views, is completely wrong. You can charge money for it, many people do, and RMS thinks this is a good thing.
Daniel Fisher really needs to do his homework. Sheesh.
DoesTheGPLAllowMoney
Can anyone provide a link to the dilbert comic where Scott Adams notes that it is a good thing engineers don't build nuclear power plants that only look like they would work?
Or unmodulated (unfiltered) other assorted goodies from around the house!!
Come on folks, be creative, this can be fun!!
I mean, all 'WE' have to do to make the Fcc scumbags quit, is to make them VERY borde at their jobs!
And we do that by making the imbicles realize that they lack the ability to control even a small fraction of the 6.5 billion of us!
And we do that by taking the shielding off different appliances around the home!!
Meanwhile, the 'white hats' over at:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/doc/exploring -gnuradio.html
will be working hard on ways for ALL of us to use the (our) airwaves LIKE IT CAN BE & LIKE IT SHOULD BE!!
LOL!!
--
Slashdot's 'Moderation System' is NOT broke..
It is simply: 'Set Up'.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
Geeze, I remember reading about the possibilities of Open Spectrum something like four years ago. Unless people were just making things up the whole time, my understanding is that yes, of course the FCC is obsolete. The catch is, usually if something is obolete the response is to upgrade rather than discard it. So the FCC's frequency allocation powers should be swapped out for a standards enforcement policy, and broadcasters can be licensed the way drivers are licenced.
Personally, I hope he's planning to make arguments and ask that the Supreme Court force a reworking of the FCC to be completed no later than 2025. Waiting until 2025 to even make the case seems like a huge waste of time to me.
Narc.
Straighten out a coat hanger and stick one end in a microwave oven.
Set it on "HIGH" and run.
that was my first look at porn,like 8~10 years old, around then, looking at national geographic magazine when I was a kid. Every month I'd wait for the next issue, hoping that somehow automagically sweden or someplace like that would have become a third world country so explorers could go explore there and send back pics of "native tribeswomen" prancing around in feathers and a smile.
pretty funny thinking back about it
We have a station here that does this on a regular basis ( and gets fined ), so it looks like the answer is yes, the FCC is still relevant.
If they were to dissapear, it would result in radio-kaos. Broadcast TV, ham radio, wi-fi, emergency radio, you name it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Without regulation communications devices would have to overcome these obstacles to be profitable/adoptable. Your phone, tv, wireless card, emergency services would automatically find a clean channel, or gaps on a noisy one, or transmit redundant information on a multiple frequencies to handle collisions with similar intelligent devices.
Yes, I already knew about the auto radar issue, it was just (perhaps too) dry humor. Remember that open-air laser transmission (as opposed to fiber-enclosed) is also a spectrum that the FCC regulates.
On the civil and military radar for aircraft, the radars have different scanning rate abilities. Radar is not all doppler frame-based. Different power transmission envelopes and sweep mechanims allow for varying signal rates from a single source. Working within a narrow band spectrum requires TDM, just like 802.3. However, signal return time, distance, and reflection aspects make sharing a narrow band like this difficult at best. There are methods, but none are truly effective at this time.
Also, I certainly wouldn't want to be transmitting in the same frequency range that an enemy surface-to-air missile's guidance radar uses. Then I would just be a target for an incoming military anti-radiation missile.
Regardless of the technology expansion, there will still be a need for the FCC and for control of a lot of spectrums.
Should the FCC try to crack down, the hackers have a powerful weapon: The First Amendment. An offshoot of the Free Software Foundation called GNU Radio is developing a new generation of radios and TV receivers that use software for just about everything except the antenna and the power source. The FCC can prohibit manufacturers from selling radios that transmit on illegal frequencies, but it would have trouble shutting down a Web site distributing software that does the same thing.
So, basically you're saying that we should disband the FCC because you can get software-configurable hardware and make a tranciever out of it and broadcast at reserved frequencies?
The spread of open source is a threat to established broadcasters, not to mention cellular telephone companies and other holders of FCC licenses.
So really OSS is a threat to licensed frequencies, in which any ass hole can broadcast any garbage they want? Nice society... thank's guys.
The article's headline is stupid. FCC becoming irrelevant because jerks now want to illegally broadcast whatever they want? It's like saying cops are now irrelevant because people want to steal things.
What it seems to me is that OSS people are becoming ass holes, in which they want to do whatever they want, whenever they want, just because they "think" they can.
"Code is speech."
No, code is a technical document. Same with blueprints. Get out of your fuckin fantisy land.
I would have to say that the free market is able to handle itself.
However, I do think that at this point in time it would be impractical to completely eliminate the FCC. Think of it like driving on the roads - no we don't HAVE to have trsffic laws, but if we didn't there would be sooooooo many lawsuits it would be insane.
My libertarian views are such that I know things will usually work themselves out. However libertarian =| anarchy and there still need to be some basic laws in place to prevent chaos.
With that being said, I think the FCC could be downsized by AT LEAST 20-40$. The rest of the federal gov could be downsized as a whole by 80%!
Libertas in infinitum
[On the amateur radio bands, a licensee] can do practicly anything, including video and several digital modes on the HAM bands, most of the restrictions only being there to reduce interferance, etc.
Then what's the purpose of the FCC's ban on music over ham radio? Is it to reduce "interferance" (sic) with the RIAA's marketing efforts?