Posted on 05/03/2011 2:00:29 PM PDT by re_nortex
Former NAB General Counsel Erwin Krasnow says that it is time for the FCC to renounce the "discredited concept" that the public owns the airwaves, which he says is the "the main reason for broadcasting's second-class status under the First Amendment."
Krasnow argues that the airwaves are no more owned by the public than is the sunlight used to grow grain or the wind used to turn a windmill.
(Excerpt) Read more at broadcastingcable.com ...
This appears to be good advocacy by a former lawyer of the National Association of Broadcasters. If adopted, it would eliminate archaic regulations enforced by the FCC. The "public ownership" of the airwaves has been used through the years to justify control of content.
raccoonradio: Your thoughts?
If the government says the own something ("public" is a euphemism for government-control), good luck telling them they don't.
The airwaves would be pretty useless if they weren’t regulated.
He chose two obvious but flawed analogies with his “wind” and “sun”.
How about “airspace”? What would commercial flight look like if there was no public control over it? How about roads — what would driving look like if the “public” wasn’t allowed to set any rules about driving on the roads, or off the roads for that matter?
What about water? There are a lot less rules, but what if water was considered a private matter, and you couldn’t control what your neighbor pumped down his well and put in “his” section of the water table?
Or what if you couldn’t stop your neighbor from damming up the stream and taking all the water before it made it to your farm?
We can argue about how much and what type of regulation is needed for the electromagnetic spectrum, but it would be wrong-headed to argue that there should be no regulation of the spectrum — it would be useless.
A specious argument ... the sun and the wind are (virtually) unlimited and renew every day - the broadcast frequencies are very limited. My use of sunlight does not prevent or interfere with my neighbor's use of sunlight - the use of a radio frquency, especially with a high power signal, can obliterate other signals. And so on, and so on ...
Government control of the content over the airwaves is a concern, but hopefully it can be addressed without the absolute chaos that would result from complete deregulation.
What I recall from history (studied very long ago), it was Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover who created the forerunner to the FCC, then known as the FRC (Federal Radio Commission) in the 1920's. I believe the intent was solely focused on the allotment of the spectrum which had descended into chaos when everyone was firing up their own transmitters on frequencies of their choosing.
What's not clear in this proposal is if the deregulation would be confined solely to content. In my opinion, an unfettered, marketplace-oriented environment for content would be ideal with the caveat being that each owner must behave responsibly for what is limited spectrum space.
Therein lies the rub in deregulation. Just who gets those slices of the valuable, scare spectrum? That "public interest" argument, unfortunately, has been used to advance the diversity rules of ownership and even the revocation of a license in the (in)famous Red Lion vs. FCC case decided by the Warren court.
Well put.
Yes. On the UHF band, there are hundreds of one MW stations here in America.
The FCC should be strictly limited to enforcing frequencies. The "license" should be issued at cost and then resold on an open market.
pinging for later...there are only so many frequencies on AM and FM and the FCC regulates them; going back to the Radio Act in the 30s, it was decided stations should “serve the public interest”—running public service announcements and serving the local community, etc.—but it’s a tough call whether to over-regulate or under-regulate. Should a company be allowed to own many stations in the same town?
Should there be no content regulations—in other words, should stations be allowed to say whatever the f-— they want without an FCC butting in? Good questions.
The libs of course can use the “airwaves are public” argument to justify everything from a (so-called) Fairness Doctrine to taxpayer funding of NPR...Many on the left complain about the ownership rules that allowed Clear Channel to own thousands of stations and companies to own multiple stations in same market...thus leading to
all-conservative-talk stations (because that’s profitable)
and domination by the likes of Rush (ahem, it was Clinton
who signed the bill)
I’ll have to look this over a bit later (very late at night now) and wonder how this will go over on the radio
discussion boards...thanks
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