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In Internet Age, Pirate Radio Arises As Surprising Challenge (ap.org)
K7DAN writes: Just as the demise of terrestrial radio has been greatly exaggerated, so has the assumed parallel death of pirate radio. Due to the failure of licensed stations to meet the needs of many niche communities, pirate radio continues to increase in popularity. Helping facilitate this growth is the weakening power of the FCC to stop it, reports the Associated Press. Rogue stations can cover up to several square miles thanks largely in part to cheaper technology. The appeal? "The DJs sound like you and they talk about things that you're interested in," said Jay Blessed, an online DJ who has listened to various unlicensed stations since she moved from Trinidad to Brooklyn more than a decade ago. "You call them up and say, 'I want to hear this song,' and they play it for you," Blessed said. "It's interactive. It's engaging. It's communal." It's upsetting many congressional members who are urging the FCC to do more about the "unprecedented growth of pirate radio operations." They're accusing said pirates of undermining licensed minority stations while ignoring consumer protection laws that guard against indecency and false advertising.
" ignoring consumer protection laws that guard against indecency"
The 1950s are over. The airwaves are in desperate need of shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.
Don't forget, all those rules are only there to protect the incumbents from newcomers... regulatory capture to impose costs on them...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
London has more pirate radio now than it did when "Radio London" was being broadcast from a ship moored in the north sea.
Current radio pirates are putting transmitters on random rooftops getting power spliced from street lighting, and sending the audio over prepay 3g dongles. Whenever they get found, they're replaced almost immediately on a different roof.
They seem to be funded by paid promotion of night clubs and minicab companies.
We would be without useful radio, television, cell phones--or any other RF-based utility--as we know them today. The airwaves are a finite [public] resource that requires strict regulation to maintain usefulness. If you don't like the way they're governed, change the government. Until then, I applaud enforcing the existing laws.
> It is also the battle cry against big government. Just enough to be effective without being a burden to freedom or prosperity.
Except that this is an absolutely impossible goal. You can't make government smaller. It is a guaranteed disaster. Whenever you try - you just create a power-vaccuum which is readily filled by somebody else. Initially, this is mostly corporations. As you reduce government size towards your mythic level (which is always described but never defined because those who say it will NEVER reach a level they consider "right") the power of those stepping into the resulting vaccuum grows and corporate executives get replaced by warlords (often the same person).
Now you either end up with a bunch of competing warlords in an endless civil war and your "official government" too small and helpless to actually do anything about it (ala Somalia), or one warlord actually manages to amass enough to quell all the others and you end up with a dictatorship.
The power you fear in big government is GOING to be wielded, there is NOTHING that ANYBODY could do to stop that. The only choice you DO have, is whether it will be wielded by a representative government accountable to you as a voter, or any of the everything else's which are all MUCH worse.
This is one reason I am an anarchist. As such I support the biggest government of them all. A government so large that EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN is an equal member of that government. 100% of the population large. And therefore, much less able to oppress anybody - while having both the will and the power to quell oppression from others.
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