Posted on 02/24/2014 11:00:47 AM PST by Jim Robinson
Bureaucracy: The FCC jumped the shark with its outrageous plan to police America's newsrooms. This grasp for a new mission signals an agency that has outlived its purpose. We have a better idea: Just scrap the FCC.
There's nothing worse than a federal agency that has lost its original mission, has nothing productive to do and, as a result, is restlessly rustling around for something to justify its existence.
That describes the Federal Communications Commission, an old-line agency founded in the 1930s to regulate a limited supply of television airwaves divided among three networks, which is now gone with the wind.
Today, television airwaves are virtually unlimited and consumers can flip through thousands of channels to find the news and entertainment they want. Besides the explosion of television choices, consumers also have the Internet, providing billions of options in a nanosecond for information on anything consumers want.
Its mission gone, the FCC is rapidly getting into mischief. It claims its mission is to lower barriers to new entry for all citizens, giving itself a civil rights patina, but its record shows a long history of erecting barriers.
Every major innovation in communication has had to scale obstacles thrown out by the FCC in an attempt to stop freedom's progress.
It's a positively medieval barricade impulse that led the FCC to try to stop the arrival of cable television in the 1970s, while on the Internet it's still hatching plan after plan to impose "net neutrality" on Internet providers, price controls that dictate how much providers can charge different kinds of customers.
The move to police the newsrooms is an effort to bring back the now-defunct "Fairness Doctrine," which forces station managers to air unpopular views outside the wishes of both owners and viewers.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
My wife has a novel approach to unwanted telemarketing calls on her cell phone. The first time she gets a call she adds the “caller” to her contacts list as “a$$hole.”
Then the next time they call it shows on her phone’s ID that “a$$hole” is calling and she doesn’t answer. I think she has about 50 “a$$holes” in her contact list at this point in time.
done that already they spoof caller ids.
[ THERE IS A HISTORY OF BOTH PARTIES USING THE FCC AS A POLITICAL WEAPON AGAINST OPPONENTS AND THE LATEST ACTION FITS THAT TO A TEE. ]
This is why they both hate the tea party, it really isn’t BOTH parties that is the problem it is the deep seated ESTABLISHMENT on BOTH sides that is the problem...
I would have thought that generally would be a Good Thing.
“done that already they spoof caller ids.”
This isn’t caller ID, it’s just a listing in her CONTACTS List on her iPhone. She looks at who’s calling and if it’s an “a$$hole,” she doesn’t answer it. For our wireline phone, we simply let unfamiliar numbers go to VM. Mostly out of area area codes.
I agree with this idea! The airwaves belong to the people not the government. I can’t think of anything useful or necessary that the FCC does.
While I fully agree with you, I don’t ever see it happening voluntarily.
When is the last time you remember any government just voluntarily giving up one of it’s weapons?
And that’s all it is - another weapon to use against any and all who disagree with them.
“For example, bandwidth allocation on the electromagnetic spectrum. It not only needs direction at the local, state, and national level, but at the international level as well, and for private, commercial and government uses.”
Why not just sell it to the highest bidder and then make that ownership a property right that may be resold? If someone trespasses on their right, they sue them.
It would work out as well as the current system.
Mega reply PING:
No more mayonnaise talk - WIN!
Milton Wolf - whatever.
John Dingell - eat poop.
Jon Cary/Uganda - interesting that the core constituency of “the virus” is never mentioned in this country anymore. What a f***in’ joke.
Just Abolish The FCC - a.k.a. “The Amerikan Ministry of Propaganda”? Yep!
I could see some really awful things coming out of that.
For example, right now bandwidth bidding auctions by the FCC are hopelessly expensive and limited to just a few players because of it. Google’s opening bid, for example was $4.6b for just a chunk of one band. If it was for an open market sale, it would likely top $50b.
So bandwidth ownership would be just as concentrated as the current media oligopoly. Fewer than a dozen corporations would likely control all the electromagnetic spectrum, except for government set asides for police and fire, air traffic control, military, intelligence, NASA, and others.
Private use would cease. Right now, the shortwave band, which used to be huge, has been sliced down to a shadow of its former self.
Somebody has to put limits on it, or private use would stop entirely. For example, just using walkie-talkies would be like using a pay phone.
Onewingshark wrote:
“It was the Obama FCC that lowered the standards For acquiring HAM radio licenses.
I would have thought that generally would be a Good Thing.”
Um, no. You are not required to have the electronics training; the morse code training; and they messed with the depth of the licensing examination.
GraceG wrote:
“Defund the FCC: Frequencies not Fascism”
With your axiom about ‘frequencies’, are you or are you not, in favor of broadband transmission or not?
A piece of history that you did not know:
The ‘frequency band’ within which most cell phones operate, at one time in the not too distant past, was a military classified aircraft radar transmission frequency. And that was in the time, when America was better than it is, today.
[ With your axiom about ‘frequencies’, are you or are you not, in favor of broadband transmission or not? ]
I am in favor of reducing the FCC down to an organization that does the simple clerical work of registering frequencies for uses and maybe testing equipment so it isn’t putting out Radio Frequencies that interfere with other radio devices. and that is just about it...
[ Onewingshark wrote:
“It was the Obama FCC that lowered the standards For acquiring HAM radio licenses.
I would have thought that generally would be a Good Thing.” ]
That was just so the DUmmies could finally qualify for a HAM license because Obama thought that too many HAM operators were conservative.
My point was that lowering the standards removes a barrier to entry.
“So bandwidth ownership would be just as concentrated as the current media oligopoly.”
Perhaps. And walkie-talkies would be more expensive. But the FCC wouldn’t be in control anymore.
“Republicans (Nixon) created the EPA, right?”
Yup. 1970 executive order. So I guess as a Republican, I have to support an agency that long ago, became a monster.
onewingedshark wrote:
“Um, no. You are not required to have the electronics training; the morse code training; and they messed with the depth of the licensing examination.
My point was that lowering the standards removes a barrier to entry.”
It was only an entry barrier to those who could not fully grasp the electronics theories, the ‘science’ behind it all, which was the reason for the tests, in the beginning.
We BUILT our radios. We DESIGNED and BUILT our communications setup, and our transmission lines.
If “you” could not do that, even with the financial means to get all the parts and blueprints, and assembly equipment, you had no business even thinking about that kind of license.
Stupidity can be a good thing, sometimes.
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