Reboot the FCC

This is another case of a lawyer who would like to throw out all the old laws and write all new ones. The guarantee is that the new ones would be no better than the old ones. Throwing babies out with bathwater seems to be the specialty of anti-regulation lawyers. There is one viewpoint that is absolutely always and forever wrong --- the opinion that all preceding opinions were, to the letter, wrong. Personally I favor barring lawyers from all elected or appointed office and especially from for conflict of interest. This would even benefit the FCC whose members are primarily lawyers.

This concept fails because chaos would ensue. Remember the great things that deregulation of the stock market did... lets see... toxic mortgages, derivatives, and a host of techno garbage.
Just because the system is deregulated does not mean that the ensuing chaos is good... By the deregulation is good standard, lets remove all of those pesky traffic laws.
It is the intelligebcia like this guy that will ruin the world for avarage folks/

DaveInHouston
what a dietribe of cr.p.. We all know it was regualtion imposed that caused this toxic mess. Insead of just FCC barney and Dode need to go to.Allong with Freddy and Fanney. and as far as brilliant guy he is more like a Poser as the skate board crowd would say.

DaveInHouston
what a dietribe of cr.p.. We all know it was regualtion imposed that caused this toxic mess. Insead of just FCC barney and Dode need to go to.Allong with Freddy and Fanney. and as far as brilliant guy he is more like a Poser as the skate board crowd would say.

You're an anachronism, Prof. Lessig. The Ayn Rand anti-government libertarian theory that has infected our country from Ronald Reagan until September 2008 has been dealt a death blow. The deregulation dogma has been irrefutably shown to be a fraud, intellectually and financially. Regulation can be bad if it is corrupt, opaque, unaccountable and stupid. What kind of regulation can you expect if the elected officials who appoint the regulators are deregulation fanatics? Ever heard of the self-fulfilling prophecy?

We need regulation, and we need it to be fair, transparent and smart. Since the anti-regulation fever of the last 28 years has abruptly and definitively crashed right at the same time that we elected a brilliant, new President (who was financed mostly by We the People), we know have a unique opportunity to replace old regulatory structures with good new ones.

iEPA? I hope Apple's lawyers come after you for that one!

I say we should demolish SEC first because they screwed up the economy and failed to enforce regulations. FCC is not doing a bad job compared to SEC. Let's get started on agency that is doing the worse job possible and have an impact on many citizens.

don't know that the remedy for too much governmnet help is a little less, but.... The problem is that three, soon to be two companies--I mean Verizon and AT&T--act every day to stifle and crowd out competition, overcharge for their outdated services, and liimit the deployment of faster and better technologies so they can maximiize the return on existing investments. Their respective advertising budgets --a cool billion each-- icould be better spent on lower rates or better technologies. The problem of scale and high cost of market entry, at least nationally, will curb the flow of innovation to the benefit of consumers. Consider for a moment the problem of streaming video and music products.. With an inexpensive, siufficiently high speed and reliable broad band, the blu ray/dvd/cd market would vanish, and so would the dozen or so major product lines dedicated to playback. The music and entertainment comapanies aren't eager to goall digital streaming, partly becuase they haven't figured out copyright protection and download charges, ansd partly because they still own factories which produce discs, and in the case of Sony, factories which produce players. Some new products are coming onto the market--like Apple TV--which are built on digital downlaods direct to TVs or audio systems, but even innovative Apple has to limit its resoultion to 720 p Tvs because of slow broad band. A real innovator could do something with small market live digital music broadcasts, a sort of live at Lincoln center or live at Yoshi's for a subscriber base that could be small--tens of thousands--and still be profitable. Instead, we have big telecomm draggibg its feet on innobation alll the way to the bank, ans using industry consolidation to pile more and more demands on the existing system. The goal of an inovation agency should be to challenge the existing giants to iinvest in the best avaiilable technologies, get them to consumers faster and at prices more likle those in Europe and Japan, and if they fon't measure up, to take away their spectrum and reauction it to some one else who will. .

Dear not ass mart - If Janet and Justin offend you for reasons other than the just plain bad music then don't listen. Your values are your values and it is up to you instill them in your children and promote them by attending a church or being a part of a social organization that nurtures and supports your way of life. It is not up to the government to make everyone else in the country listen to your point of view or anyone else's. And it is certainly not up to the government to regulate what Ms. Jackson, Mr. Timberlake, or anyone else has to say in the public media. The point being made by the author is that less regulation leads to more innovation. This is good for all Americans, even those who are horrified by wardrobe malfunctions.

dumb asses like janet jackson and justin timberlake who cant respect other peoples values are the reason we need the fcc. time and place for everything but some people just dont get it so you have to have someone to punish those idiots.

Brilliant! Look how successful deregulation worked with Wall Street.

Deregulation is pushed by certain businesses that will benefit such as ClearChannel. We need to think longer term on what will benefit everyone involved, not just big business lobbyists. And what would benefit everyone best, a smartly regulated environment.

As usual, Lessig's recommendation has little substance and a great deal of Internet religion. Yes, network neutrality makes sense. But the real reason to fix the FCC is silly stuff, like making sure that kids can't hear the same words on TV that they hear in their living rooms, or allowing cable monopolies to continue after the infrastructure is paid for. Can you do that by cleaning house and creating a new agency? Maybe, but the chances are no better than if you reinvent the agency. BTW, it's not clear why rules for, say, radio don't apply to the Internet - it's free for everyone and paid for by advertising. Unfortunately, despite hucksterism by Lessig, the Internet simply builds on the radio and TV models, with (perhaps) ease of switching channels.

Shut down the FCC? That would be a bit like taking down all traffic signals because they "stifle" innovation. Or eliminating the SEC for the same reason. Regulation of the radio spectrum is necessary in order to properly manage this important resource.

I think we all know what happens with lack of government oversight. We're paying for the results right now.

This is a ridiculous comment. Sounds like a typical neo-con argument that we should end all regulation because it stifles originality. Haven't we learned anything from the mortgage crisis about allowing business to run amok?

We are too much in the pocket of big business to ever go for this. Don't get me wrong, it would be great, but its not going to happen. Between the interests ob big business to keep a regulator doing what is in their best interest, and the religious right protesting anything that is not their precise definition of what good morality is, we will always have someone creating big agencies or large sets of rules to inhibit creativity. When it comes down to creativity, it must be hindered because it cannot be predicted or controlled. If we truly let creativity reign, then our large companies would not have guarantee that they would be the ones coming out with the next popular thing. We would not even be sure that the next big thing would come from our country.

Maybe I sound like a nut, but if you really know about the laws in this country you can see they protect big business. Take copyright law. It protects large corporations far more than it ever will for the artists. What about the idea of public domain, or when music and written works leave copyright protection due to old age? Well the clock has been stopped for public domain in the mid 1920's. and it is not moving anytime soon. If anything newer is ever put into public domain, then mickey mouse will become property of whoever wants to use the image or character. Can you imagine legally made mickey mouse porno movies? Well that would happen if we allowed creativity, and allowed anything more to enter public domain. This is only one reason why we will always have laws and agencies that counteract creativity.

Of course you cannot truly stop creativity, or can you....

The FCC is the culmination of the story of the chicken and the egg. The FCC, like the chicken, thinks that it is the provideer of eggs (monopolies and regulations), but the eggs have been made sterile by an imperialistic governing body who is responsible to no one. They think they are the chicken AND THE EGG. The First Amendment rights of 'free' speech has been chopped up and distributed to censors who control us through the media giants who control them. Their Big Brother attitude and grip on our way of life must stop, but who is going to do the stopping? Legislating them out of existence would be very difficult since they don't have a 'control' segment of government. Once again we are being shafted by the lack of oversight. Who MUST control all of our Government....US. We are the People and need to take our Constitutional birthright back.

Every so often one gets to hear the Truth spoken in the mainstream media (which is not noted for truth) and the experience is refreshing, like a breath of fresh air after exiting a grotesquely smelly public restroom. Now how do we move this idea from the printed word to actual governance reality? How do we overcome the enormity of the power brokers who control so much at the FCC and in the nation and world? This article is 'on the money' but now the author needs to zoom out to a wide angle lens for the BIG PICTURE. Killing the FCC is necessary but it doesn't disembowel the power brokers, and remember the FCC needs to go because it has been captured by the power brokers. The next really big article by this author needs to explain how we get these incomprehensibly enormous power brokers 'off our backs' in Congress, in every agency, in state and local government and in the executive office.

Had the FCC not made the under-the-wire decision they did, Sam Zell would not have been able to do that "deal" to buy the Tribune Companies... and they probably would not be in bankruptcy today.

Every so often one gets to hear the Truth spoken in the mainstream media (which is not noted for truth) and the experience is refreshing, like a breath of fresh air after exiting a grotesquely smelly public restroom. Now how do we move this idea from the printed word to actual governance reality? How do we overcome the enormity of the power brokers who control so much at the FCC and in the nation and world? This article is 'on the money' but now the author needs to zoom out to a wide angle lens for the BIG PICTURE. Killing the FCC is necessary but it doesn't disembowel the power brokers, and remember the FCC needs to go because it has been captured by the power brokers. The next really big article by this author needs to explain how we get these incomprehensibly enormous power brokers 'off our backs' in Congress, in every agency, in state and local government and in the executive office.

There are many other reasons to keep the FCC around. You overlook technical challenges to maintaining spectrum. Who owns spectrum, which is a very finite resource? What happens when interference results? What are the rules to ensure our technologies work together? You think big companies are just going to play well with one another? Forget it. We already have a flood of overseas crap that doesn't meet US requirements because like other industries the FCC has been asleep at the regulatory wheel. There are enough problems already that need to be addressed. Forget profit.