Reboot the FCC

hitnrun:

A viable industry? I don't want a viable industry. Libraries are not a viable industry. NASA is not a viable industry. I want what's best for the people, and that has nothing to do with "viability," which, I'm sure, in your conception, means wringing the most profit possible at the expense of the Republic's citizenry.

Even during the holidays, Mammon is king in America.

I started to defend the FCC based on the article. Then looked at the problem.

There is no problem. The current/future Skype and Youtubes are doing fine.

Take a look at the market cap of Google (YouTube) and Skype (EBAY).

There is also a lot of innovation in this space. There are 100s of video services, and 100s of VOIP companies. All are competivie to thes organizations.

FCC is doing a good job in managing the spectrum.

The news outlets that have to do articles every week, are doing a poor job.

How is Skype (EBAY) and YouTube (GOOGLE) being Stifled? They seem to be doing just fine with their connectivity and reach.

Maybe Google and EBay can figure out a way to make more money without taking out the government out who should be managing the airwaves with auctions. It does not work to have the people that need the bandwith to manage it.

Maybe the real problem is that EBAY and GOOGLE can out bid the companies trying to innovate. They should be broke up in 1000 pieces for the sake of the small guy.

Then the FCC wont commands billions for spectrum and the small guys have a chance.

The request question who is the problem? EBAY, GOOGLE, or the FCC. All the problem if you ask me.

Lawrence is an idiot. Clearly he has no understanding of technology from a business perspective. Someone who spends their time writing about what might be a good idea as opposed to going out and actually implementing a good idea is the last person we need to take advice from. Free markets allow innovations, but at the same time they allow consolidation so there is efficiency. We need an FCC that understands technology and understands radio frequency science. We need someone to keep orderly control but not impose ideology. It is a hard task but not impossible. Mostly we just need to make sure that ideological bureaucrats don't screw things up. We need business leaders with real life experience running the FCC so that they can find the right balance between regulation and free market principles....

What does Lawrence L. understand about electromagnetic interferance, bandwidth, modulation schemes and communication? Scrapping the FCC demands that the frequency control and allocation function be carefully preserved and maintained or much of the installed base of police, fire and ambulance radios is at risk. Your car alarm fob, cell phone, WiFi network, satellite radio service to name only a few depend on proper control of radiated emissions by users of the electromagnetic spectrum. The FCC staffing depends on technical submissions from interested parties like the Amateur Radio Relay League (Hams) and many others to provide technical assistance and perspective. Scrapping a useful function and replacing it with another requres a scapel not a chainsaw approach. Think carefully and inform yourself before you opine, Mr Lessig.

If "government" were to pull out of the regulatory business, only the rich would have electricity, only the rich would have paved streets, only the rich would have clean drinking water, and only the rich would have clean air to breathe. Alas, the "kill government vs. love government" dialectic remains irrelevant. What is needed is a continuation of practical hybrid government regulation that offers public policy transparency and public accountability. Sorry guys...old labels don't work.

Duh ? YOU DO realize you are promoting de-regulation of the air-waves?? It didn't work with banking, why do you think the
industry can regulate it self on the limited spectrum available for use.??
You wouldn't believe how many hair-brained schemes have been controlled by the FCC.
Interference among services would be horrible without control. We may as well go back to uncontrolled spark-gap transmitters that blanked out whole chunks of spectrum. If we go back, then whoever has the most powerful pocketfull of money controls the plan.

Dr. Lessig has failed to mention the FCC's role in insuring the quality of services delivered, the integrity of the means by which they are delivered, and its responsibility to enforce international commitments of the Untied States. Its engineering staff has been decimated, starting under now-transition-team member Reed Hundt, FCC Chairman under Clinton. With Gingrich and Tauzin, among others, pushing for abolishing it, and with regulated businesses exerting influence via a technically uniformed Congress, the FCC has become an agency staffed with attorney's.

All agencies were infected by a business tilt the last eight years ??? one might call it sub-indictable corruption -- but that may be reversed. The FCC has been a ???canary in the coal mine??? for this, with interoperability confusion, failed 700 MHz auctions, 800 MHz rebanding, Digital Radio and Digital TV and BPL Rulemaking, (which encountered opposition from unexpectedly technically competent Amateur Radio operators and the American Radio Relay League (ARRL).

Had the Commission listened to its own engineers, it would have picked a different technology to be cheerleaders (Chairman Powell's self description) for. Instead, it hid internal evidence it knew of problems, and altered the laws of physics to favor those pushing the technology, matters which, answering a lawsuit by the ARRL, the D.C. Court of Appeals sent back on Remand. As for BPL causing harmful interference, the Commission is acting like the crooked Police Chief whose son has a late-night garage band. ???Noise? I don't hear any noise, and neither will my officers!???

Is there need to show the Commission needs integrity??? A recent report on the FCC by majority members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee should put rockets behind it. It???s titled ???Deception and Distrust; The Federal Communications Commission under Chairman Kevin D. Martin.??? describes what the Committee found. BPL is in there too, though the Committee thinks (wrongly) that it is settled. Even, the crooked police chief makes an appearance; the the report says (noting the leaking of Notice of Apparent Liability T-Mobile) that, ???It remains a mystery why the FCC was willing to reduce the proposed $1.3 million fine to $100,000.???

It is no mystery. The FCC is a political agency. It was established to bring order to radio; still needed.. But it responds to pressure. Business wants ???build cheap, sell high??? products. Technology users want systems that work well and can be relied on. Technical folks want systems that make sense. And politicians want votes. The politicians and businesses seem to be ahead, at least as long as an FCC Chairman listens to them. And Professor Lessig seems to be taking their side.

While I agree that the FCC had terrible direction for a number of years, it does fulfill an important mission enforcing technical standards and establishing rules by which the players navigate. The dilemma is that recent leadership under Powell and Martin has been anything but fulfilling the mission. If better oversight had been practiced, their hands would have been slapped as soon as they opened their mouths to support "capitalism at any cost" policies. Most of the commissioners are rank beginners in the area of telecom and in technical standards and should never have been offered a seat.

I've been a FCC licensee for over 45 years and have watched the goings on with a personal interest during that time. Many long for the FCC of 30 years ago and I can echo much of that feeling. It had teeth in its enforcement policy and rolled out monitoring vans when stations and practices caused interference. It formulated less policy and carried out more mission.

Under political stooges such as Powell and Martin we have seen such blockheaded cheerleading for technically backward ideas as Broadband Over Power Lines (BPL) and spectrum giveaways (OK, auctions) to giant corporations that have the resources to monopolize large chunks of the public airwaves. When presented with interference issues due to BPL trials the FCC dragged its feet so long that legal action in federal court had to be brought to get them to abide by their own rules. Like any organization there are also bright spots. Riley Hollingsworth, who headed the Amateur Radio Enforcement bureau, was a gem of a man who knew both the law and the spirit of the Commission and did much to make that section run well to the benefit of all licensees.

A response to ThisMachineKillsFascists:

argumentum ad hominem (check out Wiki if you dont know what that means). It amounts to saying, for instance, I love the body of work of president Obama today, I will blindly believe him tomorrow, no matter how weird and irrational an idea he throws out. Yes, Dr. Lessig has an admirable body of work behind him. But this piece on completely stripping off FCC is just plain sensationalism that, for the sake of sanity, should not drive practical action under any circumstance.

Also, on your love for the "magic of the Internet" - the Internet was started by a goverment/military agency. That doesnt mean that the government/military agencies centric model be adopted for creating all innovative things going forward. Similarly Wiki model is great - but cannot be applied to all things going forward - thats just plain ol extremist/sensationalist talk.

Under the bushwhacker's incomptent and corrupt leadership the FCC has become a sham. We don't need to get rid of it to put in another ignorant entity that does nothing. The iEPA is a stupid idea that Obama should ignore. What is needed is to put good honest people back into the FCC so that it does what it's supposed to, honestly and fairly regulate the communcations industries. We need to make sure that democracy hater rupert murdock doesn't buy up and ruin any more communication businesses. We need to protect the liberal free press against the tyranny of right wing propaganda machines like Fixed Noise.

Dr. Lessig,
I hope you have read the Gridlock economy and understand the concept of "tragedy of the commons" and the "tragedy of the anti-commons". There are sweet spots in the middle.
Also, monopolies are a necessary evil to control chaos in network markets. If folks were to agree with your ideas earlier, we would probably have 30 telephone wires, 30 cable coaxes, and a ton of other physical wires coming into our small homes. Not to mention loads of other "unregulated" utility connections of a slightly "innovative" design reaching out to every house, with of course an exorbitant per unit cost for everything you consume.

The FCC has been nothing but a tool of industry. Everything they do is for industry where is my protection from industry? Have they done enough to bring low cost internet connecttivity to me, no. Have they brought low cost good television to me, no. Have they brought me cheap good telephones, no. FCC fail yes.

People need to understand that there is no magic to "the Internet." It is nothing more than computer-to-computer communications over exactly the same network that carries ordinary phone calls. When you view a web page, you're making the equivalent of a phone call. There's no ringer, and the information goes through a "router" instead of a "switch," but in every other respect it's just another phone call.

When one computer calls another computer, the "conversation" can consist of web pages, videos, and spoken language or music. If it can be turned into bits and bytes, it can be transferred between computers over "the Internet," just as all kinds of conversations can occur between telephones. Why point this out? Because it shows that "Skype" and other "Internet telephone" companies aren't doing anything different than what phone companies do.

But, at the moment, they pay fewer taxes and network charges for each call. Why? Because governments have decided, for a viariety of reasons, to let traditional telephone calls subsidize so-called "internet" calls, which are different only because they're made on computes and travel through "routers" instead of "switches." The costs are the aame,and so is the service, but for some reason -- ignorance, I think -- we have writers like Lawrence Lessig who imagine that "the Internet" is somehow magic.

I wonder why that is. Could it be that Lessig is, like so many in the media, too ignorant and too lazy to bother to learn his subject before writing about it?

People need to understand that there is no magic to "the Internet." It is nothing more than computer-to-computer communications over exactly the same network that carries ordinary phone calls. When you view a web page, you're making the equivalent of a phone call. There's no ringer, and the information goes through a "router" instead of a "switch," but in every other respect it's just another phone call.

When one computer calls another computer, the "conversation" can consist of web pages, videos, and spoken language or music. If it can be turned into bits and bytes, it can be transferred between computers over "the Internet," just as all kinds of conversations can occur between telephones. Why point this out? Because it shows that "Skype" and other "Internet telephone" companies aren't doing anything different than what phone companies do.

But, at the moment, they pay fewer taxes and network charges for each call. Why? Because governments have decided, for a viariety of reasons, to let traditional telephone calls subsidize so-called "internet" calls, which are different only because they're made on computes and travel through "routers" instead of "switches." The costs are the aame,and so is the service, but for some reason -- ignorance, I think -- we have writers like Lawrence Lessig who imagine that "the Internet" is somehow magic.

I wonder why that is. Could it be that Lessig is, like so many in the media, too ignorant and too lazy to bother to learn his subject before writing about it?

It seems to me that Comcast, and everyone else who decides that they have a right to over-ride net neutrality in favor of deciding which traffic to shape can no longer claim that they are just "pass through." If they were pass-through, they could not control delivery based on content - and if they are no longer pass-through, then they are responsible for every bit of child pornography and Nazi literature that passes through their network. Essentially, it seems to me fair that net neutrality is part of the social contract that society, as a whole, has with the bandwidth providers - they benefit by not knowing what passes through their network, in that they are not held responsible, but on the other side, they can't take advantage of it, either.

A big part of the problem in recent years is too many things written by people with "professor" or "fellow" in their titles saying how it'd be beneficial to have less regulation. As the president-elect famously said, "Enough!!"

The FCC has dropped the ball on TV and cable ownership, but the real show-stopping disaster for future textbooks should be commercial radio, which has consolidated to the point where a single company, Clear Channel, became dominant. Game, set and match...the FCC failed catastrophically on a core mandate. They'll say that satellite or Internet radio is "competition," but that's another thing they don't get: that not everyone has the money or tinkering skills to have the state of the art gizmos. Hard as it is for the FCC to believe, many people have trouble affording cable TV, and it's a big chunk out of many budgets. Commissioners also think they don't have to police scarcity of the airwaves with 100 or even 500 channels, but most of those channels are either hawking pay-par-view or are permutations of dominant networks like MTV or ESPN. More channels does NOT mean more owners.

So I'd agree the FCC has been a mess, though for different reasons than the author. It has bought too far into the same deregulatory mindset that others like Alan Greenspan did, and the results have enriched the few at the expense of the many. The four most dangerous words are "It's different this time" and it really wasn't that different. New technologies, but same trends toward consolidation because greed-motivated behavior in business is NOT different. And if they're not careful they'll "lose" the Internet as well. If only Obama could start from the ground up with the FCC.

There is in fact a fearsome unintended consequence of monopolization in media markets wherein the FCC has been a less than invisible hand. Those consequences are revealed when you look at advertising revenue as a benchmark for diversity in media marketplaces. If that diversity can be used to measure the health or "ecology" of our media markets than consolidation in those very same markets represents a recent major economic extinction event . Cost of entry is made prohibitive in these media markets in no small part due to favoritism shown by the FCC to major players . Lawrence is right for more reasons than the ones mentioned in his article.