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FCC Chairman Slams Trump Team's Proposal To Nationalize 5G (axios.com)
The Federal Communications Commission's Republican chairman on Monday opposed a plan under consideration by the Trump White House to build a 5G mobile network, nationalizing what has long been the role of private wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon. From the report: "I oppose any proposal for the federal government to build and operate a nationwide 5G network," he said. The FCC's reaction doesn't bode well for the proposal the Trump administration is considering, first reported by Axios on Sunday night, since it's one of the main government agencies when it comes to wireless issues.
I am sure that the government would never turn over all personal information without a warrant to the ... government.
Sounds like Lenin's wet dream. A conduct for for all information which the government has total control over. What could possibly go wrong?
It's worth mentioning to drive home the point that he works for the telecom cartel and not DJT.
While the WH was definitely on-side with the Net Neutrality debate, it'll be interesting to see Trump's Twitter reaction to this news (assuming Fox tells him what to think about it first). I mean, this will have to look like disloyalty to him, right? I wonder how he'll blame Obama or Hillary for this betrayal?
Less government, more free market is only helpful when there's competition in the free market. Back in the 3G days and before, there was competition (GSM/TDMA, CDMA, DAMPS). 4G saw all the carriers adopting LTE. That's a pretty good sign the technology has matured and competition has found the best solution. At that point, the best course of action is usually to turn it into a public utility. Build a single set of wires (or towers in this case), but don't run any service over them. Let multiple companies provide that service, paying for use of those wires/towers. That competition keeps prices low, as well as keeps a finger in the free market pie in case someone comes up with some new breakthrough.
Electricity is a good example. When it was first developed, nobody knew if AC or DC was better for long-distance transmission. Edison (DC) and Westinghouse/Tesla (AC) built competing electrical systems - entire cities were wired up with AC or DC electricity. Since the government didn't know which was better either, the smart thing for it to do was to stay out of it and not try to regulate it.* Both systems competed, and it soon became clear that AC was superior. Pretty soon all electrical systems were AC, and that's when the government stepped in and converted it into a utility. Your local power company built, owns, and maintains the wires. But in most jurisdictions you can purchase your power from any number of electricity providers. Those providers pay the owner of the wires a fixed rate, set by the local or state's public utilities commission.
* GSM is a good example of how to screw this up. The EU government regulated too quickly when it developed GSM and mandated it as the standard all EU phone companies had to adopt. GSM was based on TDMA - each phone took turns talking to the tower. That worked fine in low-bandwidth applications like voice, but once cellular data became the hot commodity, it was terrible. GSM wasted data bandwidth by allocating it to phones which didn't some or all of it. Fortunately the US didn't adopt GSM and let cell phone companies come up with their own systems. A few tried CDMA - each phone transmits simultaneously, and the tower tells them apart via orthogonal coding (kinda like writing on a sheet of paper, then turning it 90 degrees and writing on it some more - the letters are orthogonal enough that you can distinguish the vertical ones from the horizontal ones). With CDMA, each phone sees the transmissions of the other phones as noise, which raises the noise floor and reduces the signal to noise ratio, automatically dividing the available data bandwidth between all transmitting phones. It completely blew GSM out of the water. Enough so that within a year GSM threw in the towel and was amended to include wideband CDMA for data. That's why CDMA networks got 3G data about a year before GSM networks. That's why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a second CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had a single radio for both voice and data.
So 5G is a good candidate for converting the cellular network into the utility model.
Some people like to call Trump a fascist, and this, potentially nationalizing what now belongs to private industry to serve the body state, is a feature of Mussolini's corporatism (not the usual government by and for the corporations, as it is commonly used, but private industry serving the corporate (body) state).
Now, I know they're talking about Federal ownership like the way the roads are maintained, but do you think a compromise deal between privatization and government ownership might include the beginnings of corporatism? It just might.
Oh... and Ajit Pai is a tool. This actually isn't a bad idea, if the government wants to roll out 5G securely and quickly, but it is a bad idea if private industry winds up being mixed up in co-ownership with the government. That's not a good thing at all.
More importantly than anything it segregates the infrastructure from the service. A government run infrastructure would sell access to telecommunication companies to handle the calls. You'd have dozens of choices of telecom providers with different service offerings.
Government run infrastructure in natural monopolies is always the best solution. In fact government owned with yearly bidding on maintaining and running the system would be even better with all costs rolled into the access fee's charged to telecom providers. We'd have 100% national coverage and multiple providers in every area instead of the current system where rural people get the choice of verizon or verizon.
Your psychoanalysis of a man you've never met and don't actually know beyond a newspaper byline is interesting and all, but I don't see what it has to do with my comment about Ajit Pai.
Trump's behavior is a well-documented matter of public record that's been effusive throughout the public sphere, making your challenging the ability to do so dubious, but the fact that Trump himself adamantly insisted upon us doing so, makes your objection even more of a fraudulent pretense. Combined with your inability to see the reflection upon Trump, well, it's quite obvious you're a Stalwart, and a True believer, so you'll reject anything that challenges you devotional paradigm.
Do keep pretending you're not obvious though.
The fear of a corporate monopoly is misplaced and overblown. Corporate monopoly with government backing is IMHO the worst possible option. The current US Healthcare system is doing more harm than any corporate monopoly in history. We're taught to be petrified of these corporate monopolies taking over our lives, but even the Hudson Bay Company at it's height still had competition; everyone was scared of oil prices under Rockefeller, yet doomsday never actually came. Breaking up Ma Bell saved us from... we don't know.
Has there been a time or place that a corporate monopoly somewhere brought the people to their knees? Hard to find in history; De Beers, Luxottica, and Caviar are probably some of the most successful. If you avoid Diamonds, sun glasses and smelly fish you aren't even effected. However it isn't hard to find in the present day governments that are much more fearful and destructive. It's logical to be more fearful of a government monopoly.
Government run infrastructure in natural monopolies is always the best solution.
As a card carrying lefty, I wish that were the case. Unfortunately, all monopolies have a tendency to stagnate, and public services are no exception to that. The definitive answer has rarely been simply nationalising/privatising the service, the subsequent monopoly eventually leads us back to where we started.
Big organisations have a habit of falling into bureaucratic ruts that are resistant to change. Some form of competition is needed to pressure them to continue to innovate & improve efficiency.
In our modern capitalist economies, there seems to be a universal cycle:
1. Government creates public infrastructure X that works well & supplies for the population's needs at a reasonable cost;
2. After a number of years, the public infrastructure lacks sufficient improvement and/or bureaucracy becomes a huge drag with no incentive to streamline. Service improvements stagnate & administration costs spiral out of control;
3. The public become disillusioned with the public service & cry for competition;
4. The public infrastructure is privatised to incentivise competition;
5. Competition drives innovation & improved efficiencies;
6. The "winner" eventually becomes a monopoly, kills off competition through sheer market dominance, surpassing the need pressures to innovate, and uses its position in the market to gauge its customers;
7. The public become disillusioned with the high costs & poor service, & demand government intervention with the renationalisation of the service.
Rail, post, utilities, you name it. It's the same story, again & again.
It's a constant battle between monopolies' economies of scale versus the competitive pressure to constantly innovate.