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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 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?
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.
Yeah, I mean, if we didn't have the FCC, who would fine TV stations for showing bare asses and hot cheerleaders during football games?
-=JML=-
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
"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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.