FCC vs decentralization

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 04:36:56PM +0100, Thomas Shaddack wrote:

> FCC recently mandated fees for Internet radio "broadcasters", based on the

You're hailing from .cz, me from .de. Of what relevance is FCC to us?

> number of listeners. However, there are emergent technologies for P2P
> broadcasting, where some of the clients act as broadcasters themselves,
> "retranslating" the stream. This way it may not be technically possible

There's Peercast, but there's also Alluvium:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/29436.html

Maybe a peerpunk can post a summary, of what's out there?

> for the broadcaster itself to know the number of listeners -> impossible
> to assess the fees -> impossible to getting reliably proved the number of
> listeners to. What can happen then?

Technically (advocatus diaboli, that is), if listeners 
are broadcasters, they need to keep track of
whomever they're broadcasting to, and do the accounting.

Of course this is difficult to enforce, especially if streams cross
jurisdiction compartments. Of course, there is this trend for nivellation,
driven by lobbies.... 
 
> Similar with FCC decency rules they recently tightened after the
> "Superbowl Boob Incident". How can the FCC execute their jurisdiction over
> a distributed struture, where there is no official registered owner of the
> station? Can they go after the volunteering DJs, or after the listeners?

In theory, yes.
 
> How would look a good, decentralized structure for allowing pseudonymous
> IP stream "broadcast" with minimal resources, the ultimate Internet Pirate
> Radio station?

Lag is no problem, but QoS is. I'm not sure traffic remixing allows for that,
given current prevalence of ADSL and cable modems.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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