Another restriction on technology - cell and cordless scanning now a felony

[Bill Stewart]

At 11:00 AM 07/18/2002 -0400, cubic-dog wrote:
>How is it legal to outlaw reception of radio
>transmissions under the FCC act of 1934?

The laws that established the FCC were just laws -
they're not Supreme Court decisions that are hard to change.
Congress made them, Congress can unmake them, change them, or
replace them with totally different laws.
They're not engraved in stone requiring Constitutional Amendments to fix -
they're written in sand, and if the wind blows the other direction
and 51% of Congress wants to change them, they're changed.

The FCC has limitations on how much *they* can change basic structures
set out in the laws, but the laws give them a lot of flexibility too.
The real stability is that the current regulatory structure
gives big economic advantages to the entrenched players,
so they're going to resist changes that stop favoring them,
while the regulatory bureaucracy gets a lot of power and influence
from giving favors to the big players, so they don't rock the boat either.

>I have never understood this. I keep expecting at
>some point, someone will somehow come up with a
>good reason to take a monitoring claim to the
>US supreme court and get all these laws tossed
>aside. But I guess I am expecting too much.

Nobody's had a good enough case, and the lawmakers have tended to go along
with the FCC on things like laws against monitoring unencrypted cellphones
(the alternative would have been removing laws and policies that
banned or discouraged encrypted cellphones,
which they didn't want back then, because Commies might use them
or the FBI might have trouble wiretapping cell phones without
getting proper warrants.)

>For all of it's faults, the fcc act of '34 established in law that
>the air waves are public property,
>that broadcasters operate under license and don't own jack shit, and
>that broadcasters must act in "the public interest, convenience, and 
>necessity."
....
>*WE THE PEOPLE* own the airwaves. PERIOD.

It was a terrible policy and we've suffered from it ever since*.
It's led to the current media oligopolies, with a narrow spectrum
of opinions from the pro-establishment pro-government corporatists,
pernicious policies of political correctness that, while not as
strict today as they were in the 50s, still strongly limit the
kinds of content you see on TV - and all of these were the kinds of things
that the policies were *intended* to do.

Unintended effects of the policies include decades of
restricted access to telecommunications in rural areas
(because the FCC's radio monopolies prevented development
of economical scalable radio-based telephony, which fit just fine with the
FCC's support for wireline telco monopolies.)  This also delayed
practical mobile technology for a decade or two.
Look at the explosion of interest in 802.11 wireless as an example
of what happens when you've got even a small space available
to use by the public rather than the bureaucracy and its friends.

Dave Farber and Gerry Faulhaber have a bunch of papers and a presentation at
http://rider.wharton.upenn.edu/~faulhabe/NEW_SPECTRUM_MANAGEMENT.PDF
There's further discussion at
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200206/msg00082.html
and a long nice article from the Seattle Times at
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134476462_spectrum17.html

The 1934 policies took spectrum that was a commons available to everyone,
seized and nationalized it in the name of "the public", and
turned it into a tool for political patronage.   Competition for use
of the spectrum worked fairly well before that, and it wasn't just
because of the primitive state of technology - Italy did without
radio spectrum licensing through most of the 80s and 90s
(they had an official bureaucracy, but it's greed was exceeded by
its incompetence, so the radio broadcasters started to just ignore it;
this lasted until right-wing media magnate Berlisconi became prime minister.)

Farber and Faulhaber point out that the regulatory environment is
incompetent, inefficient, and unnecessary, and make a good comparison
to the old Soviet GOSPLAN economic central planners;
they argue as engineers as well as economists.
While I disagree with their recommendations (big-bang auction of the
whole spectrum, and let the government bid on some space for unlicensed 
commons)
it couldn't be much worse than the current system.


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* In David Brin's recent speech at the Libertarian Party National Convention,
he reminded us all that "FDR was 60 years ago - get over it!" :-)