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Comment by seltzered_ | Hacker News Reader

This. From the article:

"“As a believer in free markets and the rule of law, I cannot support a government mandate requiring activation of these chips,” Pai said. He believes the FCC doesn’t have the power to issue such a mandate and says it’s best for the market to sort things out."

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Sometimes when the rights of sellers and the rights of buyers clash, it becomes obvious that the rights of buyers should be protected by the government through regulation since the market isn't fully free due to monopolistic or oligopolistic market forces. Even Mr. Pai can see that this is stupid, but is unwilling to require manufacturers to do the right thing. This is one of those cases where libertarianism loses its appeal.

What? According to the article, "44 percent of the 'top-selling smartphones' in the US had activated FM radios". If you want a mainstream smartphone that can listen to FM radio, that is totally a thing you can just buy.

No. In this case he's spot on. There's really no need for the government to interject in this specific matter.

What monopolistic market forces? There are dozens of phone manufacturers and you can buy an unlocked phone and use on any GSM carrier.

Libertarianism loses its appeal because cell phone manufacturers don't want to waste money and engineering time supporting FM radio, which almost no one listens to anyway?

There's plenty of competition among cell companies, and the market has spoken; people don't really care about FM radio on their cell phones.

>... which almost no one listens to anyway?

"Traditional AM/FM terrestrial radio still retains its undiminished appeal for listeners – 91% of Americans ages 12 and older had listened to this form of radio in the week before they were surveyed in 2015, according to Nielsen Media Research. This data is derived from diary-collected listening information from a sample of over 395,000 respondents over the period of one week, as a part of Nielsen’s RADAR study."

http://www.journalism.org/2016/06/15/audio-fact-sheet/

You are quoting a mouthpiece for US radio broadcasters. That's a cherry picked measurement, it's clear while people still listen in cars, they listen less and less outside of their cars. Radio is losing listening hours every year and becoming less and less important, which is why smartphone makers have little incentive to support it.

The proof is in the revenues.

"AM/FM’s revenue from “spot” advertising (ads aired during radio broadcasts, its main revenue source) declined 3% in 2015, while revenue from digital and off-air advertising both posted gains – 5% and 11% respectively. This revenue pattern largely mirrored that of 2014, when spot dollars were also down 3% for the year"

I'm not quite sure that I follow your rebuttal. Are you claiming that Nielsen did not do a study of 395,000 listeners over the age of 12 using diaries? Also, could you help me understand why revenue declines for spot advertising has anything to do with the number of actual listeners to the radio on the FM band? Your original claim was that "almost no one listens to FM radio" but that's clearly not the case... failure to monetize the consumers have a particular media is not at all an indication of consumption of that media. 91% of Americans could be listening to public radio for all we know.

I listened to FM radio last week - once, for about 10 minutes.

15 years ago, I listened for an hour and a half a day. As a teenager, I'd listen throughout the day. Teenagers generally don't do that anymore - Spotify, Pandora, etc., have supplanted FM radio as the delivery channel of most music (and news).

The survey still records accurately that I listened in the last week, but I'm no longer a profitable listener. Advertising prices reflect that decline.

I'm interested to hear why people listen to terrestrial radio though (especially for people in the United States).

I stream BBC Radio 1 when I drive to work and I live in Bay Area, but I haven't found a terrestrial radio station that I would listen to.

Because I turn on my car, and without changing anything, the radio comes on. No batteries or data plans to worry about, and there's a decent interface that's integrated into my car.

I can get the same stations through IHeartRadio. I could get a phone dock, a bluetooth device to connect to the aux input (car doesn't have BT), an adapter for power (cigarette adapter), and all that. And I'd spend 20 seconds each car trip turning on BT, opening the streaming app and navigating to the station, fiddling with volume. I could stream stations from outside of my area, but I pick up worldwide news all day anyhow. My commute's for more local stuff.

I'm just not a fan of using my phone for streaming in general.

Also FM/AM reception feels like it's more robust than DAB/LTE/3g reception - often I can still listen to FM/AM in areas where other wireless tech black out.

Up until recently it was too expensive to stream anything on a HSPA/LTE connection in Australia. In Canada, even more so.

We have decent non-commercial options here on AM and FM.

I agree with you. It doesn't matter though.

I think we can all predict the future here pretty easily. The instant this went into affect if anyone ever tried to create a rule (assuming it's survived court challenges, etc.) Apple would simply demand from its suppliers that they give them chips that DO NOT have FM radios.

It's not like Apple is hiding GPS functionality from users will relying on it itself, it's just a little thing that happens to be tacked onto the silicon. If the government tries to force Apple to do something they don't want, they'll just choose to buy chips without it.

At that point you're where the Radio industry tried to be many years ago where instead of asking for the thing that's on the phone to be turned on, you're now trying to mandate features into the phone to protect your business model. That's a very very steep slope to get support for.

Consumers are free to vote with their wallets, this doesn't seem to be a big deal to many of them. I don't think there's a clear public interest in requiring it the way there was GPS functionality to help locate people calling 911 for emergencies.

Even if the groups got their way, there are so many ways for Apple and others to wiggle out of it that I don't see how this would ever work.

On a side note, in the US there's no actual requirement for cell phones to have GPS. They can use triangulation off of cell towers, so long as they can get the required accuracy.

Huh. I remember hearing that a lot of phones would cut back to 2G (this was a couple of years ago) when you were calling 911 so that they didn't have to use GPS to get the required accuracy which I guess was only required at 3G or 4G connections.

It is a matter of safety. Given a national crisis, the cellular networks may go down, but the radio will practically always work.

If something takes out the 215,000 cell towers in the us, I wonder if that something will affect the 27,000 FM Radio towers as well - some of which are co located on the same masts.

Granted, it's easier to broadcast FM and be received

> If something takes out the 215,000 cell towers in the us, I wonder if that something will affect the 27,000 FM Radio towers as well - some of which are co located on the same masts.

After Hurricane Sandy, all the cell towers in Lower Manhattan were out of service - between my roommate and me, were were unable to get any signal on Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint.

Fortunately he had a hand-powered radio (electricity was also out) and we listened to that to determine when it was safe to go out, when the cabs were running, etc.

Cell networks can go down for non-structural reasons. Radio has no network load.

> people don't really care about FM radio on their cell phones.

Thanks for all that data! I loved my last phone with a radio.

>"...He believes the FCC doesn’t have the power to issue such a mandate and says it’s best for the market to sort things out."

Good thing we're paying him to perform such an important job. ...Wait, what is supposed to be doing?

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