[extropy-chat] FWD (SK) RFC: copy protection report

[Samantha Atkins]

On Dec 5, 2005, at 1:42 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote:

> --- Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> On Dec 4, 2005, at 9:43 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote:
>>
>>> --- Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> The FCC should be disbanded as utterly useless and in the way.
>>>>
>> Their
>>
>>>>
>>>> "powers" are arbitrary and pernicious.    What exactly do they do
>>>> that needs doing and that wouldn't be done better by a free
>>>>
>> market?
>>
>>>
>>> Make sure no one corporation owns all the TV stations or similar
>>> media outlets in any area with more than a few of them (which
>>> would let them impose legal censorship - corporations not being
>>> governed by the First Amendment).
>>>
>>
>> hehehehe.  This is the internet age.
>>
>
> True, but quite a few people do still rely on TVs, radios, and
> dead tree edition newspapers for their media.  It may be a market
> of increasingly less significance, but it continues to exist.

Sufficient to need a FCC?  I don't think so.  The FCC is the biggest  
source of censorship in US media.

>
> Until TV et al completely go away, for even the most Luddite
> citizen - and they probably never will, for that reason alone -
> the "physics" of their world will continue to exist in a
> meaningful context (even if one of meaning to fewer people as
> time goes on), and continue to imply the necessity for a federal
> beauracracy to manage them.
>

What for?  The airwaves aren't really so limited after all.  TV is  
going digital.  Cable/satellite penetration is huge and growing.  And  
why would it be government's job even assuming it somehow needed to  
be centrally managed?

> The question is whether the FCC has or should have any relevance
> to the Internet.  The FCC of course wants the answer to be "yes",
> but so far it's been mostly confined to fairly mundane parts of
> it - like making sure one ISP can't get away with arbitrarily
> blocking content provided by partners of a rival ISP, and trying
> to make sure that multiple ISPs can compete to provide service to
> any given major market (so we don't run into the problems where
> one company owns all the 'Net pipes in a certain large city, and
> can effectively censor the 'Net for that city - and as China
> proves, less-than-perfect-but-still-enough-to-heavily-damage
> censorship is technically possible if you do own all the pipes).
>

There is not much of a problem as long as the internet is an end-to- 
end mechanism.  How the heck would you get a total monopoly on pipes  
except through government fiat?  Without the FCC we would be less  
likely to get such monopolistic control on internet content than with  
it.

>
>>> Keeps people from jamming various frequencies, intentionally or
>>> unintentionally, so that certain forms of wireless communication
>>> don't work.
>>>
>>
>> It is trivially to track jammers and does not require a federal
>> bureaucracy to do so.
>>
>
> But it does require someone to set the rules as to what legally
> counts as "jamming".  If two radio stations broadcast on the same
> frequency, and are not obviously just trying to stomp out each
> others' content, someone has to decide how far apart they must be
> and how much overlap of their signals will be tolerated.

This is increasingly irrelevant.
>
>
>>> And that's just off the top of my head.  One might wonder if
>>> their mission, justified by the scarcity of resources in any
>>> communications medium, is obsolete with respect to the Internet,
>>> but radio, TV, and newspapers do still exist offline.
>>>
>>
>> Wireless technology has improved to the point where there is no
>> longer a very compelling reason to sell broadcasters fixed slices of
>>
>> the spectrum.  Of course for a little while the required transmitter/
>>
>> receiver tech is not common and available at a reasonable price.  But
>>
>> the FCC stands in the way of some of that instead of helping it
>> along.
>>
>
> Actually, the FCC has been trying to help that along, and has
> been facing major resistance (lethargy/"Idunwannas" from lack of
> immediate profit to all concerned, mainly) from those who would
> transmit and, to some extent, from those who would receive.  The
> transition to HDTV alone has had much written about it, and
> that's merely one particular example of trying to optimize use
> of a certain slice of the spectrum.
>

The FCC is not helping.

> There's also the fact that very few TV stations have, so far,
> willingly put their feeds up for people to access over the
> Internet, and some have even taken legal action against those who
> try to do so for the benefit of their viewers.  Just because you
> and I know that it helps them, does not mean they do not view it
> as a threat to their existence.  We're still in transition, and
> will be for a long time, so we can't yet completely abandon the
> old support structures.

FCC is not supportive.  Censorship by definition can only be done by  
governments.  The FDA makes a great tool for censorship.  Monopolies  
are primarily granted and maintained by government force.  The FCC  
has acted throughout its history to support de facto monopolies and  
sell monopoly rights.   The old support structures had questionable  
justification under old conditions.  As those conditions increasingly  
are not present they have none at all.   Do we really need an  
organization to raise hell about an exposed breast?

- samantha


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