Low Power Radio Setback by Congress

akb writes "Congress hobbled the FCC's innovative proposal to license thousands of low power radio stations via a rider on the session ending omnibus appropiations bill. Instead of having thousands of licenses available nation-wide 200 will be available in 9 states (for info on how to sign up go to the FCC's LPFM page). Its unusual for Congress to second guess the FCC, there was intense lobbying by the National Association of Broadcasters to keep the airwaves out of the hands of community groups. For news on the legislation see the story on Indymedia, for background on Low Power Radio see the Media Access Project's LPFM info."

Re:i'm sorry

you just got to love the way crap gets passed in congress... they have this wonderful habit of attaching really nasty riders to otehrwise innocent or otherwise beneficial legislation...

kindof like how they passed the censorware provision in a funding bill... its absolutely insane, and if your a congresscritter, you cant vote against it because you'lll be seen as voting against funding public libraries...

damnit, i liked the line item veto...
tagline

Re:Trade Groups (no, not trade groups -- NPR!!!)

The exceptionally disgusting fact about the whole LPFM debacle is not the presence of industry trade-groups -- you could have expected that.

It's the presence of NPR. Yes, National Public Radio -- public broadcasting. In an effort to justify their existence and keep a stranglehold on what they consider "community" broadcasting, they have done a deal with the devil and allied themselves with the major radio station congolmerates which have sprung up over the past few years.

Remember that next time you consider pledging. Some of your dollars are being used to lobby congress to keep you out of the game!

Re:i'm sorry

Congresspeak:

"via a rider on the session ending omnibus appropiations bill."

Translation: The people in the appropriations committee bowed to the pressure NAB and attatched the unrelated restriction of micropower stations to the budget. Now, this happens to be the last thing that was done before congress gets out for the year. The only reason they did it is because they NAB knew that there would be a lot of justifiable pissing and moaning, so they decided to slip it in the back door

Re:Stoping (sic) Peoples Free Speech

In a technological society, the distribution of speech becomes synonomous with free speech. To be refused the opportunity to use modern communications technology is no different than being denied free speech. Or is modern communications technology only supposed to be for the rich and powerful?

No more funding!!!

Since NPR was part of the effort to block this, I suggest we stick it to them.

This time of year, Public television stations and public radio stations run a lot of "pledge drives", where they try to guilt-trip their listeners into giving them money. Why not give their waiting volunteers a friendly call, and politely explain that because NPR has chosen to prevent free and fair use of the airwaves, you would like to pledge a donation of ZERO DOLLARS to public broadcasting this year. Then follow that up with a postcard, letter, or e-mail that says the same.

NPR already enjoys the benefit of tax subsidies so they can broadcast Boston Pops concerts in Minot and "Mr. Rogers" in every remote corner of the country. If they want any further support from us, (or even if they want their current support to continue), they ought to behave in a manner that encourages more good will among us.

Jobs

Congress is in bed with big biz because it creates jobs, growth, employment, paychecks, wealth, taxes & keeps away ranks of unemployed marching around w/ placards demanding "down w/ the govt." Isn't that worth giving up all your little individual freedoms for????

Re:Trade Groups (no, not trade groups -- NPR!!!)

Not suprising. NPR is no different from LPFM except that LPFM is more honest. NPR is a buch of liberal trying to disquise their message as 'unbiased' while trying to hide behind a veil of 'independance' because they haven't been 'bought' by 'big business advertising'. Instead, they have 'supporters' who recieve 'recognition'.

I supported, and still support, cutting any government support for public broadcasting. If they can't find enough people willing to pay directly to support their views, then obviously no one wants to hear them. The government doesn't need to unnecessarily second guess the wishes of the population.

What would happen if there was no FCC?

Then who the hell controls it?

Seems to me that I've heard the same thing said about the Internet. Back in 1993 people were incredulous that something as complex as the Internet could self-organize out of virtual anarchy.

You'd have tons of people broadcasting over eachother, others just trying to scramble other peopel.

Would you, or wouldn't you? What would really happen if there was no powerful central authority like the FCC to dictate who was allowed to broadcast on what frequency? Would chaos rule, or would a spontaneous, distributed order arise?

IIRC, the concept of the government owning the spectrum and doling out licenses is based on the idea that it's a scarce resource and has to be rationed. What that fails to take into account is that scarcity breeds ingenuity. For example, compression was a huge deal back in the BBS days. There was serious competition among transfer protocols (ZModem, Hydra, YModem-G, etc.) and archive utilities (PKZIP, LHARC, ARJ, etc) to squeeze the absolute maximum out of the 2400-bps links of the day. Now that we have honking big fiber connections we don't worry as much with it.

So with regards to the scarcity issue, if there were no FCC the marketplace might have already evolved standards for digitizing and compressing audio broadcasts, to squeeze every possible bit of performance out of the spectrum.

Although I suspect there would be some jamming, it'd probably be on the same limited scale as the script-kiddie DOS stuff on the Internet. It simply isn't profitable or worthwhile for companies to try to jam each other (if it was, Yahoo and Excite would be sending ping floods and ICMP fragments at each other all day long.) The jammer kiddies could probably be thwarted for the most part by industrywide adoption of something like spread-spectrum in combination with public key authentication.

Perhaps packet radio (IP over ham radio - anyone else remember KA9Q?) would have taken off, and we'd have had a wireless Internet years ago.

Then again, it's also possible that the moon is made of green cheese.

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More info on FCC and micro-radio

There is some excellent reporting on the whole FCC micro-radio topic here [reason.com], and also here [reason.com]

These were written a few monthes back, and don't apply to the recent stupidity of congress. They are, however, an excellent review of issue of the FCC and their recent positions on micro-radio.


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man sig

more corporate control?

damnit... the FCC made a half decent decision, and the corporate lapdogs in congress decided to back the big money in entertainment and remove more of theses PUBLIC resources from the general populace...

i dont get it anymore... who the hell is running this country? it isnt the people...

for christs sake, GWB got elected with about 20% of the eligible voters voting for him? does that sound like the MAJORITY of people want this guy to lead... its a minority... a very small minority is running this country, and selling the people out for the dollar...

i guess the RIAA and broadcaster associations are scared of a bunch of small radio stations that they dont own... who knows, maybe they'll play music OTHER than the crap pushed byt the big 5... my god, the horror!!! someone might listen to something else...

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Re:Stoping Peoples Free Speech

Freedom of speech is protected, but it is legal to place limits on time, place, etc. By limiting local radio stations, Congress has not stopped you from saying anything. They've merely restricted the mechanism that you use to say it.

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Ian Peters

Contact your Congressmen

The Low Power Radio Coalition has made it easy for you to send letters to your Congressmen. Just click on http://congress.nw.dc.us/lpr/ [nw.dc.us], fill in your zip code, and then click on a few buttons. Text for letters will be generated for you. I recommend that you cut/paste the text into a real word processor and print from there, since it will look more professional. It'll only cost you $1 in stamps to mail the letters, or you can have them emailed.
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i'm sorry

but does this make sense to anyone?

"via a rider on the session ending omnibus appropiations bill."

I jumble it's think a random just words of.



wray

Re:Stoping Peoples Free Speech

This is probably the key issue for fighting this action! The first amendment supposedly guarantees freedom of the press. That includes the right to set up a press with no licensure. Broadcast airwaves, on the other hand, have always been subject to a scarcity doctine. They are the press, so they are somewhat free, but that freedom is circumscribed because there isn't enough spectrum to go around. That is a technical matter and it is recognized legally.

Now, the FCC is the agency charged with determining technical matters on the airwaves. They determined that the old FM interference rules, promulgated in the 1950s during an era of vacuum-tube radios, are obsolete. With considerable study, they loosened up the requirements just a smidge, but enough to let in a lot of <= 100 watt stations. (They explictly rejected their original proposal of allowing LPFMs to have 1000 watts, and rejected 2-channel spacing, but allow 3-channel spacing instead of the old rule's 4-channel requirement.)

Now the NAB et al are concerned about competition. They are making noises about interference, but there's a strong record at the FCC to show that those concerns are not realistic. So they're trying to change the law to override the FCC. Trouble is, the FCC's law interfered with freedom of press because of interference concerns. The FCC's record should be a good weapon in court to prove that the new law is a violation of the free press -- it goes beyond what has been demonstrated technically necessary.

And if that law falls, then the whole issue of broadcast licensure may even be subject to reopening. After all, Congress has demonstrated that it's based on anticompetitive theory, and thus has made the whole thing suspect. Wouldn't that be grand!