House approves new digital-TV deadline:
The U.S. House of Representatives on Monday approved legislation to complete the country’s transition to new, higher-quality digital television by Feb. 17, 2009.
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Congress is eager for broadcasters to give up the analog airwaves, some of which will be auctioned for commercial wireless service, a sale that could bring in billions of dollars, potentially plugging the government budget deficit.
First of all, how on earth does Congress (or the FCC) think they own the radio spectrum? Sure the spectrum exists, but how do they have any legitimate claim to it? Does simply writing “We own the spectrum, you do not” on a piece of paper suffice? It does not follow that because a resource is relatively scarce it must be artificially controlled by the State.
Could you only imagine the crazy economic and societal ramifications involved if a Department of Breathable Air tried to monopolistically manage levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen and oxygen? Oh nevermind…
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Perhaps Congress and the FCC have yet to come to terms with The Myth of RF Interference?
See also: DSSS, Software Defined Radio (SDR)
The most freightening thing about this whole HDTV thing is the govt will give TV’s to people who can not otherwise afford HDTV. I think this whole program is laying the groundwork of rolling out 1984 like TV service so the government can watch us in our homes.
John: have you read Peter Huber’s “Orwell’s Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest”? It’s a sequel to 1984 made by doing a cut-and-paste job on the original, with a very different outcome. It used to be available on-line, but I can’t find it now. Anyway, worth reading!
The push to legislate HDTV into widespread use is of particular concern to the many Congressmen who receive significant financial support from the TV and movie industry.
Mandated digital television will have other laws piggybacked on it, like mandatory encryption and playback prevention controls on TVs and recorders, and criminalizing the modification of one’s own video equipment.
The TV and movie industry hate that people can record free television with their VCRs. They plan to make sure that freedom is taken away as soon as possible.
Once all this is in place in the US, you can expect Congress and the White House to impose these same Orwelling laws on other countries via trade agreements, treaties, and UN agencies. Heck, it’s already begun. After all, freedom abroad can foil oppression at home.
If we assume a la the tragedy of the commons, that somebody is going to have to regulate (& in reality that means own) the radio waves then I suggest that would best be done by the government (give the power to somebody else & shortly they will be the government but without constitutional controls).
The comparison is not with air, of which there is an effectively unlimited demand & thus the laws of supply & demand are not invoked, but with the sort of regulation of water used in desert by the Pharoahs & other water empires.
Neil,
“It’s a tragedy of the commons” and “therefore regulation is needed” are often put together as though they logically follow one another, but they do not. The tragedy of the commons is about insufficiently well defined property rights. If these rights can be defined, it does not follow that anyone at all is required to regulate.
Paul D wrote:
The TV and movie industry hate that people can record free television with their VCRs. They plan to make sure that freedom is taken away as soon as possible.
In other words, the Analog Hole.
Mandated digital television will have other laws piggybacked on it, like mandatory encryption and playback prevention controls on TVs and recorders
High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), illegal to reverse-engineer due to the DMCA.
and criminalizing the modification of one’s own video equipment.
Again, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Because people seem to be missing the basic point that frequencies of light (radio) cannot be scarce, below I’ve pasted a fair-use excerpt from The Salon: The Myth of Interference by David Weinberger:
There’s a reason our television sets so outgun us, spraying us with trillions of bits while we respond only with the laughable trickles from our remotes. To enable signals to get through intact, the government has to divide the spectrum of frequencies into bands, which it then licenses to particular broadcasters. NBC has a license and you don’t.
Thus, NBC gets to bathe you in “Friends,” followed by a very special “Scrubs,” and you get to sit passively on your couch. It’s an asymmetric bargain that dominates our cultural, economic and political lives — only the rich and famous can deliver their messages — and it’s all based on the fact that radio waves in their untamed habitat interfere with one another.
Except they don’t.
“Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature.” So says David P. Reed, electrical engineer, computer scientist, and one of the architects of the Internet. If he’s right, then spectrum isn’t a resource to be divvied up like gold or parceled out like land. It’s not even a set of pipes with their capacity limited by how wide they are or an aerial highway with white lines to maintain order.
Spectrum is more like the colors of the rainbow, including the ones our eyes can’t discern. Says Reed: “There’s no scarcity of spectrum any more than there’s a scarcity of the color green. We could instantly hook up to the Internet everyone who can pick up a radio signal, and they could pump through as many bits as they could ever want. We’d go from an economy of digital scarcity to an economy of digital abundance.”
So throw out the rulebook on what should be regulated and what shouldn’t. Rethink completely the role of the Federal Communications Commission in deciding who gets allocated what. If Reed is right, nearly a century of government policy on how to best administer the airwaves needs to be reconfigured, from the bottom up.
Not to mention that there are new technologies like Ultra Wide Band that don’t use a specific frequency at all. A practically limitless number of UWB signals can all be communicating at once without any interference.
Naturally, the established cartels and the FCC would not like to see this sort of thing take off. The FCC can send its thugs to hunt down unauthorized free speech if it occurs on a normal radio/TV frequency, but it’s technically unfeasible to monitor or regulate UWB.
Also, don’t miss the Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005 (HR4569), proposed just before Congress closed for the holidays.
“The Digital Transition Content Security Act would embed anticopying technology into the next generation of digital video products. If it makes its way from Capitol Hill to the Oval Office and becomes law, the measure will outlaw the manufacture or sale of electronic devices that convert analog video signals into digital video signals, effective one year from its enactment. PC-based tuners and digital video recorders are listed among the devices.”
“House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican, introduced the bill, which is backed by Democratic Rep. John Conyers. Sensenbrenner’s goal is to protect analog content from theft, which has been made easier in the wake of the transition to digital technologies.”
To quote George Carlin:
Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.
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