Any more than is driving a car. You need a license. Otherwise you are presumed likely to hurt people due to ignorance and lack of skill—just like Limbaugh.
The indubitable reasoning instigating the Communications Act of 1934 realized that if everyone had a radio transmitter at their will, no radio system could work. Pretty simple and extremely rational: You would have a situation where all could shout, while none listen—in other words, today’s Internet. But I digress.
As a limited national resource, the nature of the radio medium does not permit of simple analogies with the public square nor freedom of the press. You can place twenty times the newspaper vending machines in a city block than you can allocate radio stations to serve it. If you prefer, fill the sidewalk with 1000 megaphones and petitioners; but you can’t just add 1000 radio stations.
So, broadcasters are obliged to maintain their limited number of competing licenses by sharing the airwaves on behalf of the public. Necessarily, not every viewpoint will get the infinite airtime it no doubt deserves. Responsibility for the public interest is not simply heaped equally upon each station. More realistically, FCC expects good faith attempts at serving the public interest largely by encouraging a general even-handedness of representative stations in a ‘market.’ Consistent with their recently tossing “the fairness doctrine,” FCC is happier seeing competing stations than forcing each to schizophrenically adopt opposing orientations to the listener’s confusion. The relevant discussion is not at the lofty heights of the Supreme Court but at the thoroughly empirical and gritty level of how broadcasters attend to their community in context with others, and in consideration of significant variation in national market traditions.
Even the police do not have ‘free speech’ on police radios, nor pilots on aviation channels. Though the mandates for the Amateur Radio Service or Citizen’s Band are different still, the principle remains the same: Free speech takes a back seat to the prescribed communication purposes of all radio Services. And most Services maintain constant lobbying to ensure the FCC receives no cause for thought about increasing their performance standards or restricting their spectrum allocations. Thus, large-scale complaint filings such as about the SuperBowl costume fiasco have been observed to make the broadcast industry abundantly nervous. For specific stations, a large complaint file can seriously complicate their license renewal.
Today’s dysfunctional FCC has not impressed anyone with responsiveness. Nevertheless, if you want to end broadcast hate-mongering save your time arguing about free speech with dittoheads, and use it to entreat your friends to file virtually daily complaints against that lard-ass, mentally- and morally-defective, excrement-luncher—this IS the internet, after all—at:
FCC Leadership: Headless, Gutless, Senseless
By Stanley JungleibNo CommentsRevised: 20120602
This is too sad to belabor. But you need to know that the agency that promises to protect us from cyberwarfare by hardening the internet cannot even protect us from Google.
In obvious pre-election fear of the new web robber-barons, after a two-year effort FCC just punted and fined Google $25,000 for illegally gathering servers full of personal communications with their street snoops. Does anyone imagine Google officers chastened and dissuaded, or simply laughing their asses off as they unroll a well-planned series of strategic workarounds?
For perspective, FCC routinely levies minimum fines of $17,000 against wayward FM pirates, CBers, hams, and restaurants with cell phone quieters. FCC just fined Clear Channel $22,000 simply for vague contest terms. They got ripped off! For only $3,000 more, Clear Channel could have bought the rights to data-mine all of the country’s personal online activity.
FCC’s purported investigation was stymied simply by one engineer claiming the 5th Amendment and hence offering no information on those who green-lighted the project. Though its Chairman is an admittedly brilliant Communications jurist and former Supreme Court clerk, FCC was curiously unable to uncover essential evidence despite this stonewalling. (Notably, several European agencies are not so timid either in their fines or continuing investigations.)
Now FCC implies that Congress missed something; as if we don’t have enough laws and precedent against invasion of privacy, illegal wiretapping, to say nothing of that pesky 4th Amendment protecting personal security. In fact, Mr. Genachowski has been legally advising the FCC since the early 90s, specifically assisting two previous Chairmen by writing their telecommunications legislation; and now twenty years later finds enough loopholes surrounding encryption to obstruct his own decisiveness on behalf of the public? Ultimately, Google got off simply because you didn’t encrypt all of your love letters and other private information. Their theory is that you invited data rape. That is how your FCC is protecting you today; by deciding your digital life is all fair game for the unseen.
Effectively, Chairman Genachowski just told every internet service they could do whatever they like by simply adding $12,500 per year to their cost of doing business. What nonsense be this? Was he oblivious to privacy issues when writing the laws or only now while incapable of respecting them? You cannot call this incompetence: he is too smart. We are left only to suspect the accelerated collusion and corruption surrounding this budget-strapped and weakened FCC since Genachowski’s rise to stardom with The 1996 Telecom Act—which also dissolved your rights against cell towers in your back yard.
Julius, can we just cut through the crap? Any ambiguity here resides only in the minds of the industry that put you there and continuously pushes the limits of conspiracy to steal personal data for profit. Otherwise there would have been no basis for action at all, no need for over two years of continuing international investigation, no grounds for anyone to claim the 5th, no need for bullshit excuses about encryption, no need for House Energy & Commerce to investigate you as a paradigm study for needed reforms, and finally, no need for the U.S. public to live with Federal acquiescence in this cover-up and continued erosion of our rights to privacy.
Mr. Genachowski, again, please exit through the gift shop with your former colleagues via that golden revolving door that you have so publicly applauded. I was going to refrain from saying that you have ill-served the President, until finding that Wikipedia already predicted you to be gone in 2011: “criticisms have become numerous and increasingly vocal among consumer groups and legislative supporters about his lack of substantive accomplishments to date.”
Yes, it gets worse. This update notes a March 11 report from The Hill that oxymoronically reports the White House wants to move Genachowski out of FCC because of his inaction, to Commerce Secretary, which needs a more active leader. I can only conclude that no one can make sense of this without further information that is apparently not public.
Revised: 20130323: Mr. Genachowski has resigned.
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