Comment by innguest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by innguest | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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