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Google Wants To Administer the First White Spaces
aabelro writes "Google proposes to the FCC to become the administrator of a White Spaces Database containing geo-location information about devices using the free channels in the radio spectrum."
I would much rather the FCC be the administrator of it. I know Google is the big player right now, but it is still just a corporation(especially one that profits from data mining/advertising). The government is not for profit. Google is completely for profit. The government is more likely to make access to the database free. As always, as those who know my views can guess, I trust the government more than I do corporations, and this includes corporations like Google.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
I agree that the way that broadcasters have "parked" spectrum is appalling. Did you know every FM slot is "taken" even in areas where no one uses them ? I once tried to buy a radio station-it was an education. The fact is that even here in media saturated NYC there's a lot of unused RF, and at the higher UHF allocations the fact that one market might interfere with another is greatly lessened. There is no good reason why we need to regulate the way we have been. It's like making a national park with strips of industry. The real reason is that this was a great "restraint of trade" for the established propaganda providers (see "community FM radio") Still, if I were a broadcaster, I'd be very afraid. Since the Congress is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate america, google can't do a worse job than the FCC.
I really like the "Google is NSA" tag. I think it's my favorite conspiracy theory yet!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Google slogan : "Don't be evil"
Google slogan in 5 years : "Don't be soooo evil"
Google slogan in 10 years : "Just don't be as evil as Satan himself"
Google slogan in 20 years : "All your arses are belong to us"
The FCC should have responsibility for this,and so should maintain the data.
Google wants to get a foot in the door to be able to control/promote a wireless carrier in this spectrum.
And that I don't much mind. But they should have to pay, or at least compete, for that space.
In a way, this is worse than the major carriers playing tic-tac-toe with spectrum auctions.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The first thing a hacker would do is use a trim() function and destroy all the data...
Summation 2
I don't know if google type are clean as angels, but at least with google you know up front that they are for profit. With the government, they say they are not for profit when they are all out to make a buck (or a few million) for themselves.
I've been paying attention to US politics since Eisenhower/JFK transition years and I have yet to see this asshat voting out theory turn to practice. What happens is one group of asshats replaces another one. We have two groups of asshats who swap off every other election or so, but the continuation is corrupt government, whistleblowers or potential whistleblowers in government bureaucracy are always afraid of repercussions in their jobs (or worse...). Both those government hijacking groups lobby hard and perpetually to scare the population into "not wasting their vote" on any alternative to the asshat nominee, to insure only asshats get voted for. It is a remarkable effective and simple technique in keeping the asshat party, the one with two wings, in power.
So even if you decide to "run for office yourself" to help clean things up, you are lucky to make it past real local elections, county or above, you toe the asshat party line or ..nothing. You most likely won't get elected, big fat waste of time, and if you do get elected, you are in peril of either being marginalized, or heck, they off people man. The dual wing corrupt asshat "shadow government" just plain do not like honest people who aren't bribed or blackmailed off. Stuff happens to those folks, or they just get completely ignored, one or the other.
The closest we have come to breaking this power sharing corrupt criminal cartel and kleptocracy is the reform party efforts, but they scared the two wing asshat party so much that they decided that they "wouldn't allow" anything *but* asshats on the stage at the big national debates, and the asshat controlled media went along with that. Pretty much knocked the stuffing out of any third party/alternative vote efforts.
The League of Women Voters, to their credit, dropped their sponsorship of the asshat national debates at that time. Which should have been a major clue to the electorate..but around 97% or so now have caved in and decided to "not waste their vote" and have kept electing asshat criminals right along since then. And the asshats make damn sure government is run as a for profit bribery and influence and jobs peddling organization.
Any real mavericks, perhaps with new ideas or..gasp..not corrupt, really honest people, get marginalized and demonized immediately in the controlled asshat press, labeled as "fringe", or they just get completely ignored.
So..my conclusion is..there's about no diff anymore if some corporation or alleged government runs things, the asshats are in charge in both areas, and its the same people with revolving door government to global corporation jobs, etc, where just about everything at the decision making level is done with behind the scenes payoffs and bribes, etc, and our form of government should more fairly and accurately be labeled as a Corporatocracy.
It is not as bad as it could get yet, obviously there are some other rather extreme heinously run nations that are even more despotic and corrupt, but this has been the trend and direction, heading towards that total despotism, as long as I have been paying attention.
What is sad and funny at the same time is sitting in the middle, having to shift all around all the time so as not to catch any asshat cooties, and watching both asshat extremes of the vigorous "true believers" types point fingers at each other across some fairy tale imaginary dividing line while they chant in unison "It's all your fault!! If only all of OUR asshats where in charge, things would be just so much bettah!".
Damn funny really.
What this has to do with Google and whitespaces and spectrum, etc I can't say in exact terms, but I am fairly confident to predict that in general terms, which ever policy that will go to ship the most amount of cash into the fewest amount of hands will eventually turn out to be "the" policy or regulation, etc. What asshat spokesmodel they slap in front of that will be mostly irrelevant.
You're leaving out a major stipulation of the FCC's ruling: whitespace devices must listen before transmitting, not just query the database. They can't just check the database and begin broadcasting. Not only does that potentially cause the interference with the primary user you're concerned about, it could easily run right over the top of other whitespace devices, thereby seriously limiting their utility.
Given the listen before transmit rule, and given that the rural areas you're talking about have the least number of active primary users, it seems unlikely a marginal TV station will ever suffer interference from a whitespace device. There's plenty of truly empty spectrum to use first. Unless they proliferate even more wildly than Google dreams, I find it hard to believe whitespace devices could even come close to crowding the licensed users in rural areas.
Consider also that very likely it's your farmer's own whitespace devices that are the closest to his TV receiver. After all, his nearest neighbor is a mile or two away. If he encounters a bad device that somehow, against all the mechanisms in place, manages to interfere with his television reception, he can always turn it off. More likely, considering said whitespace device is probably providing him Internet service, he'll turn the TV off and get his TV program through his Internet-providing whitespace device, with a better picture, albeit more slowly. (Yes, as it turns out, it's possible to get a fuzzy signal out of a digital television tuner. My brother pulls in marginal stations that way.)
As for your licensed wireless mics, I suspect they'll be gradually replaced with whitespace mics. The tech who has to find a usable chunk of spectrum manually had better learn other skills, because that process is a completely automated feature of whitespace devices. More than likely, they'll be able to get Internet connectivity using the other whitespace devices in the area. I can easily see whitespace devices proliferating widely enough that every area has at least one whitespace ISP. It might even be free for low throughputs.
If Google has dreamed big enough, they'll use something similar to the Android development process to push, entice, cajole, and bully hardware vendors into producing whitespace devices capable of mesh networking. The spectrum in question allows signals to propogate far enough that a whitespace mesh has some small chance of springing up. Then the whole world changes. Internet becomes truly ubiquitous.
But that's just a dream.
So just missing the cigarette holder than?
If you use sites that advertise through them you *are* getting something in return though.
Anywhere you go that google tracks you, they are paying someone for the privilege to track you, that someone provides you a service with that money.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
This is simply a way to monetize something that was intended to be free.
Free or not, where there is a demand, the market will create itself and Google plans on being there first. I RTFA and it seems to me that they are just trying to "grade" a whitespace based on its physical location and the devices at that location. So and so coordinates, with yada-yada using it. Check. The database is simply to let those users know who is who, and where.
The next step would be, in my mind, to strangle the supply of whitespace by camping as many geo-locations as possible.
(wow, that actually sounds like fun...Pitch a tent and roast marshmallows!)
My first impulse(were I without a conscience) would be to lease/mount a transmitter on every cell tower out there, specifically to fill whitespace. It could simply broadcast old Jimmy Swaggart reruns or simply white-noise. Just keep it filled to claim priority. After all, the idea is to keep people from interfering with ANY other transmissions...even if it is someone simply camping the whitespace there. This is basically a Land-Rush on the whitespace, and the lawyers think that mapping it all will give them something to work with...some sort of claim of rights to that whitespace.
When you have most of it camped, you are then in a position to start making deals.
Market created.
The problem is eventually that "non-existent" market will drive use to the point it actually WOULD interfere with adjacent frequencies...exactly what was trying to be prevented by the creation of whitespaces.
Back to square one with Google making truckloads of cash in the process.