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Comment by innguest | Hacker News Reader

> Unfortunately, this is kind of a red herring. There are a few places in the telecommunications act that require the FCC to fine for indecency/obscene material.

That is the true red herring we hear over and over again. Don't worry about censorship, you can still say indecent/obscene things... if you happen to have been awarded the broadcasting license.

Sir, or Ma'am, please understand. The censorship problem we anti-FCC complain about is the problem of not being able to get a license in the first place. You and others like you are always addressing this red herring non-issue of indecency and obscenity. That can only happen if you get a broadcast license. The problem with the FCC is that they are a gatekeeper for getting a broadcast license and it is at that point, when they are deciding whether to give the license that they exert the most dangerous kind of censorship. Not after you have the license.

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> not being able to get a license in the first place.

Sure! You should totally be allowed to throw up a transmitter and blast white noise through fifty percent of the radio frequencies at 50 kilowatts of power! And so what if the car next to you on the highway has a transmitter that interferes with your radio tuned to the classical station by blasting dubstep. FREEDOM

The problem is, that's all covered under Title III. Title III is very specifically about radio broadcasting.

And has nothing. At all. To do. With Title II.

And so what if the car next to you on the highway has a transmitter that interferes with your radio tuned to the classical station by blasting dubstep.

Well, I'm already driving out of the state tomorrow, now I know what I'll be doing with my unlicensed FM transmitter.

Forgive my ignorance, Why would i need a broadcast license?

Is this to start an ISP? a website? or what?

I'll answer you because you're asking explicitly, but see warfangle's reply to my post making fun of me.

What warfangle etc don't understand is that was exactly the excuse for the FCC to get into the Radio business. Oh no, it wasn't to require licenses! It was to protect people from warfangle's "chaos" that he paints so vividly but that never happened in actual reality, you know, the one we live in. Maybe it happens inside the theoretical realities that warfangle makes up. Regardless.

So the FCC at first was all like "yeah we need to step in to protect the radio waves from jumbling". Even the president at the time said he saw no problem with just leaving it be. But the FCC got its way. But oh! We forgot. In order to protect the waves from jumbling we'll need to require that people get licenses, but you know, it's just to assign a name to a frequency. That's all! But you need a license.

The same will happen online. Not at first, but eventually. And the excuse will be the same. Netflix uses too much bandwidth? Well, they'll need a license. Suddenly all busy websites need a license, but they'll only get it if the FCC approves it. Netflix? Granted. Popcorn Time? Disallowed. Mainstream X? Granted. Controversial Y? Disallowed.

Wow, that "history" is so painfully wrong. The FCC didn't lobby to get involved in radio, nor did it somehow add the licensing requirement after it was granted regulatory authority over radio.

Licenses that could be denied for radio was a policy adopted by Congress in the same law that created the Federal Radio Commission, before the FCC existed. The FCC inherited its radio role from the Federal Radio Commission. Neither the FCC, nor its predecessor, could have lobbied for the power to grant and deny licenses, because they didn't exist when Congress was considering creating that power.

The FCC frequently stop pirate radio stations since they were not granted a license to broadcast and were causing harmful interference with those who DO have a valid license.

Please step outside your bubble and understand what the FCC does.

And a citation for you, cheers mate: http://www.fcc.gov/maps/fcc-enforcement-actions-against-pira...

If you wish to test them, please setup a pirate radio station and you will be arrested. The sentencing is not pretty, so tread lightly.

I think you just proved his point. Bye bye thepiratebay or anything else the US government calls a 'pirate' website.

Oh yea, be sure to pick up your public web service license so are not causing harmful interference with those that DO.

I think there is a fundamental difference between the internet and Radio.

Radio represents a hard-limited amount of spectrum. There is literally a maximum amount of broadcasts that are possible before you have to start overlapping on the same frequencies. Those pieces of spectrum can be owned or rented just like public address space on the internet.

The internet has no such limit, adding to the internet just makes the internet bigger, it doesn't push someone else off the internet.

The real corollary to pirate radio would be someone hijacking google.coms DNS records to point to their own website instead. And tthat is and should remain illegal.

How is it that nobody thinks forcing people to obtain a license for broadcasting isn't censorship, and/or forced monopoly? Like how do you reason yourself into believing those two things are false?

Like, the biggest problem is that people are unhappy with comcast and there's no alternative. Then they get the bright idea that making entry into the market harder will fix this problem?

There's very limited spectrum and if everyone is fighting to see who can broadcast the loudest the entire system will fail.

There's also very limited land but land is not tightly controlled by an unelected government agency the same way radio waves are.

If what you say is true then we should be able to buy and sell radio wave frequencies from each other. But radio waves are treated specially by the government because they're a long range means of communication. Same with the internet. That's why the FCC wants in. Not because "it's limited". Land is limited, where is the FCC for land? Gold is limited, yet we can freely buy and sell. Everything is limited but the FCC only has eyes for LONG RANGE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION. Why?

EDIT for temporal:

Please explain this:

"One of our troubles in getting legislation [to nationalize the airwaves] was the very success of the voluntary system we had created. Members of the Congressional committees kept saying, 'it is working well, so why bother?'" -- Herbert C. Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency 1920-1933, at 142 (1952). Cited in Hazlett, 1990.

Aside from the fact that radio waves have strategic role for every country, it's mostly tragedy-of-commons case. You can't just let anyone start broadcasting anything at any power and frequency, because there's no way they'll themselves coordinate to use the spectrum wisely instead of trying to overpower one another until the whole thing collapses into a total and unusable mess.

> Everything is limited but the FCC only has eyes for LONG RANGE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION.

Well, there's the matter of their statutory brief. There is a reason they are called the Federal Communication Commission, and not the Federal Every Limited Resource Potentially Subject to a Tragedy of the Commons Commission.

It's pretty easy to identify when land is in use, but not so much when it comes to radio spectrum.

> Land is limited, where is the FCC for land?

Lol, that's the government. You cannot "freely buy and sell" land, you have to follow certain processes to register your dealings and you are responsible for how you use that land (zoning, environmental laws etc). That's basically what the FCC does for airwaves, except they want to make sure you'll be "responsible" before they actually allow you to register your dealings.

> How is it that nobody thinks forcing people to obtain a license for broadcasting isn't censorship, and/or forced monopoly? Like how do you reason yourself into believing those two things are false?

We grant land ownership and leases. Why not radio spectrum too? Not all that different really IMO.

If the major problem as you see it is the cost of licensing, then I don't really have a response to that.

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