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Anytime Adbusters is mentioned, I feel the urge to pimp The Rebel Sell.

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Heh, this makes me happy to study American cases.

…oh wait. I don’t understand ours either. Crap.

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I’ve read the American cases more extensively than I’d like, and trust me, there’s nothing to understand.

All you need to know is that the FCC has exclusive jurisdiction over the spectrum, which is owned by the government, and since it’s only useful as a regulated, limited resource, and therefore some content restrictions are inevitable, it’s to be allocated based on usefulness-to-the-public, which means that they can dole it out however they feel like and that free speech is not really an issue.

The result is that good spectrum goes to the military, crappy spectrum goes to amateurs, less-crappy spectrum going to licensed commons use like WiFi, and anything decent goes to the highest bidder. There, now you know everything there is to know about U.S. spectrum policy.

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Thanks for that, Adam.

My brain tried to run off while I read, but I managed to trap that little bastard right quick.

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Although the history of the FCC is kind of funny, in a morbid way — the future President Herbert Hoover actually ran the pre-FCC organization and wanted exclusive licenses over the spectrum, but Congress wouldn’t give him the authority to give them.

So Hoover said “OK,” and went and did it anyway.

Then various groups started “spectrum-hopping” to crowd out rival stations, and Hoover couldn’t get them to stop, because he couldn’t get his decisions enforced.

So basically, he struck a deal with the head of Zenith for Zenith to file a lawsuit against Hoover, which Hoover conceded, and then just stopped regulating broadcasting at all. Predictably (and as Hoover had planned), the industry degenerated into complete chaos almost immediately as everyone just tried to digitally shout over their rivals, and for some time (months), no one had any radio use at all — until Congress came back to Hoover, hat in hand, admitted they’d been pwned, and voila! The FCC!

Also, here are my notes from my Telecom Law class, on the previous subject:

The more pragmatic rationale for spectrum regulation is that it is a scarce resource and that without some sort of organization, interference prevents productive use. Indeed, without the formal definition of interference protocols, transmitter powers, etc., none of it works at all.

However, the more common justification for the FCC are their traditionally articulated goals for broadcast regulation: “competition” and “diversity.” Occasionally “localism” is also suggested as a goal.

These three goals are in tension with one another. If diversity is distinct from competition, then sometimes the “market” has to be limited in order to provide for greater diversity. Localism is in tension with both competition and diversity. Therefore there have to be tradeoffs in allocation.

The key content-regulation cases here were Shuler and Brinkley — these cases involved a political agitator in LA and a quack doctor selling goat-testicle remedies over the radio. The FCC revoked (refused to renew) their licenses, and the DC Dircuit upheld the decision despite free speech concerns — both were free to speak as they wished, but the FCC was under no obligation to allow them to use a limited public resource to do so

That’s basically the state of things, despite some small token movements, largely based on the credibility of the success of WiFi. We’ll know a lot more here when we find out how the spectrum bidding just recently shook out. They’re coming up on the end and that’ll pretty much define the space of the industry for the near future.

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[…] discussing the Adbusters case previously mentioned here in class, my constitutional law professor sent me an email elaborating on the subject, and since I […]

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