Dave Farber Named FCC Chief Technologist 29
Telecommunications coder since the 1960s, outspoken professor, and
testifier
in the Microsoft trial
David J. Farber
has been named the
chief technologist at the FCC.
Currently at U-Penn he is working on high-speed networking and distributed computing. Those on his "Interesting People" mailing list know him to be on the cutting edge of the tech memepool. I'll rest a little easier knowing he's "on the inside."
The importance of good FCC regulations (Score:2)
Why the FCC? (Score:1)
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There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
For all the people of the world (except the USA) (Score:2)
Re:For all the people of the world (except the USA (Score:3)
See www.fcc.gov [fcc.gov]
Maybe we'll get some decent wireless data services (Score:1)
//Phizzy
Bravo! (Score:1)
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I noticed
the FCC, a historical rant (Score:3)
The original rational of the FCC was that the bandwidth of radio communications was limited, so you needed this government agency to regulate who owned what frequency and what power (and hence range) they were allowed to have. I'm not sure I agree with this, but at least you can make a case for it (the alternative would involve some pretty chaotic "arms races" with the deepest pockets buying the heaviest signal and stomping on anyone else).
But somehow or other they got from this to a justification for government censorship of the airwaves (restrictions on "sexual or excretory" language, no direct calls to action, noncoms can't mention ticket prices, and so on). This rules are pretty vauge in their details and that seems to be intentional: you don't get shutdown for violating them, but they might be used as a pretext for shutting you down, if it was politically expedient (e.g. there was a college station whose frequency was turned over to a religious group during the Reagan years).
But okay, say that you buy that it's appropriate for the FCC to regulate *broadcast* technology, possibly including speech. How do you justify that the FCC got involved with regulating Cable Television? And now how do you justify that they're getting involved with regulating the Internet? Anything that vaugely involves "communication" seems to fall under the FCCs domain (I expect marriage counsellors will be next).
Anyway, these guys scare me. You're talking about a federal bureaucracy that's in the business of routinely regulating speech, with barely a squeak of anyone shouting "First Ammendment".
The Interesting-People mailing list (Score:2)
This proves that they're going too far (Score:2)
FCC people should only need to understand radio waves and 1910-era technology. Ok, that's a bit of an overstatement, but that should be the limit of their authority: public media (i.e. radio broadcast frequancies) stuff that nobody owns.
FCC's interference with other media (phone lines, cable, etc) is government control of private communications. That's bad. FCC shouldn't be poking their nose there, and their people don't need to understand these technologies. They don't need a "chief technologist". Why the hell do we keep giving our government more and more power?
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Re:This proves that they're going too far (Score:1)
This should be interesting (Score:4)
Dave has always enjoyed being in the thick of things. It was one of his grad students (Dave Crocker) who, while at Rand, wrote RFC 822. Dave was one of the prime movers behind CSNET, which as far as I can tell was the first ISP...run with government seed money as a trial baloon to see if the Internet could be financially self-sufficient. Dave was not only on the board of directors, he contributed software which he'd had written for other purposes.
The reason that I'm heartened is that Dave isn't an expert in just one thing. He's one of the very few Renaissance men of the Internet, with a perspective far wider than most folks running around today. This is just the sort of person that the FCC needs. Those who think he should be elsewhere, where the "really interesting" stuff is happening, I think underestimate what the FCC is going to be doing (forced into doing) over the next few years.
try reading your history before complaining (Score:1)
companies with monopolistic control of a market do things that are not good for consumers, and ultimately, are not good for innovation. microsoft's predatory behavior while cranking out crappy product and forcing people to use it is NOTHING compared to what Ma Bell was up to pre-divestiture.
the problem with the FCC is that phone and cable service, by their nature, represent natural monopolies, and therefore are very tricky to regulate. the FCC is far from perfect, but their ultimate goal is a good one.
Re:the FCC, a historical rant (Score:3)
There was an article by Ayn Rand entitled (IIRC), "The Property Status of Airwaves". If I have a copy of it, I can't find it, so I'm working from memory here.
She stated that the FCC regards all bandwidths as its property, which it lets broadcasters use - if they abide by its every fiat. She saw a number of problems with this including the possibility of censorship or favoritism.
Her solution was that the bandwidths be homesteaded and be regarded as private property, with all that that implies. Broadcasting in someone elses bandwidth would be theft. Broadcasting slanderous or fraudulent claims would be prosecuted as such.
(What follows are my own thoughts, not her's.)
Under this system, (explicit) government censorship would be impossible, because there would be no license to revoke. Illegal methods of censorship, such as murder or bandwidth flooding, are still possible, but that would be an overt act and surely people would act to overthrow a government that would resort to such methods. Less overtly, the government could 'fail' to protect the rights of a broadcaster, which would 'permit' another entity with greater broadcasting power to seize control. I don't know what can be done to prevent these 'planned failures'. I also do not know what could be done about people who, failing to maintain broadcast capabilities, would not sell their claims to bandwidths; A sufficiently monied and motivated fool could buy large parts of the spectrum and leave the air dead.
If the bandwidths were private property, the governments function would be merely to keep public record of ownership and protect that property. This same principle could be applied to IP addresses and domain-names. The government's only acts would be to keep record and protect. At least with regard to domain names, most of the disputes would be easily solved. Someone with a valid IP address would step foward to lay claim to a name. (A commercial entity could not register in the org tld, because that would be fraudulent.) Name squatting would be limited by the need to have a valid IP, but name speculating would not be. (Ain't I a clever wordsmith!). Domain names would not be regarded as even comparable to trademarks just as call letters are not. Come to think of it, there might be a good analogy there: frequency is to call letters as IP addresses are to domain-names. Of course, it's not a perfect analogy. However, if time-domain broadcasting ever takes off, that could change.
Of course, I'm thinking from within the USA, and the internet in worldwide, so there's lot's of things I haven't considered here. IANA and NetworkSolutions seem to have worked, in the sense of not censoring content; perhaps there we have a good model of non-government regulation that needs to be studied further. But of course, IANA et al. have their authority from DARPA or some other parts of governments, so this is more complicated than I care to consider in just this post.
I hope that Dr. Farber is able to bring some wisdom to the FCC instead of being touted as an approving seer when the FCC does something bad. Hopefully, he will be courageous enough to survive and change that pandemonium, or to expose it when needed, or to abandon it and disavow it when he can do no more.
Maybe I don't remember my history too well... (Score:1)
Strangely, the government granted AT&T a fiat monopoly which explicitly prevented anyone else from competing. So far as I know, they didn't do this with Microsoft.
You might say Microsoft earned a monopoly while AT&T was given a monopoly. Of course, that's assuming that Microsoft didn't steal anything (or otherwise violate anyone's rights) and you'd also have to ignore the effect of IBM choosing MS-DOS as an operating system
FCC? Perfect! Farber's a big control freak anyway! (Score:1)
Unfortunately, Farber is NOT ill-suited for the job. He's a perfect fit, for all the wrong reasons. Specifically his testimony in the MS trial [usdoj.gov] presents a puritanical visage that is probably a prerequisite for working in a bureaucracy as gargantuan and entrenched as the FCC.
A quote from the testimony:
"But only the availability of an unbundled version of Windows 98 will cure the difficulties which arise for many OEMs, application developers and retail end users who may find too burdensome the problems arising from their inability to substitute different functions and applications (such as the Web browser) for use with only parts of what is now sold as Windows 98."
Clearly Farber is implying that the government should be allowed to design (or impose design requirements on) Microsoft's software products. Of course some will argue that Farber is only providing a rebuttal to Micrsoft's contention that the browser is an integral (and necessary) part of the evolution of the PC operating system. In fact, he presents an effective counterpoint on this subject. But the additional facts that he 1. worked on the side of the government's obviously specious and authoritarian "case" and 2. concluded his testimony with the above statement clearly indicate that his is yet another in the endless parade of narrow, bureaucratic minds produced by late 20th century academia.
To paraphrase some bimbo: Don't hate me because I'm honest!
Bandwidth, a historical rant (Score:1)
Of course, it seems that there's plenty of this sort of thing going on already.
Re:Bandwidth, a historical rant (Score:2)
What I was alluding to was a more anarchist approach, let anyone broadcast anything, anywhere at any frequency, at any power, and yeah, a system like that would have the kind of problem you're talking about (I called it "arms races", i.e. he who can blast enough wattage at a given frequency could win that slot). It would be an interesting world... though I can't in all honesty say I'm sure it would be a better one.
(One possiblity is that with the FCC preventing entry of new stations between the old ones on the dial, there's been no incentive to improve radio tuner sensitivity. Could it be that without a standard spacing between frequencies, we'd have a dozen times the number of stations, and really good tuners to pick them out of the chaos?)
Anyway, radical changes in the way the FCC regulates the airwaves are not going to be easy to bring about. I think the real hope is for new technology to get around the FCC (e.g. the development of celluar internet radio), but there's a real danger that the FCC will always be able to scramble after new tech, and claim it as part of their domain.
I remember when... (Score:1)
To his credit, he eventually realized that people were either not going to pay or that they weren't going to stand for someone leveraging their personal e-mail into a money making scheme. You'd think these tenured professors would make enough money as it is.
Of course, I also remember standing in his office, at the EE Dept. of UoD, asking for a project and being handed the task of porting MMDF from VMS/pascal to Unix/C. Little things like discrete math, calc and courting ended up kicking my sophmore ass all around the campus that semester and I had to give up working with one of the more interesting people at UoD at the time. In retorspect, I probably would have been much better off if I had ported MMDF; eventually we both left UoD for something better (in fact all the good people I knew at the UoD left it some something better and I'm not talking about the students).
I still believe the man has good moral and ethical grounding (there was a case at the UoD where someone "borrowed" a computer to do work and the University was ready to fry; Dr. Farber took the kid under his wing and told the finger pointing pencil pushers to shove-off... and that's just one of a 1000 good things you'll hear about the man); now if we could just get him into an important position at the NSA, that would be an accomplishment.
...sigh, those were the days, my friend.
Re:Maybe I don't remember my history too well... (Score:2)
the US government, it was officially
sanctioned by the US government. Phone and
cable may be "natural monopolies" or they
might not... we don't know because the
government stepped in and handed them an
exclusive franchise long before any kind
of economic equilibrium was reached.
Re:For all the people of the world (except the USA (Score:1)
look on the back of your computer (I'm assuming that you're using one if you're posting to
Anyway...
On the back of your computer gear, You will find a little sticker with the FCC ID in the United States. Depending on how backwards your little country is, you might find a similiar sticker, for a similiar beuracratic agency from you're country (modeled after the USA's FCC with minor variations for political curruptness, or lack there of). You will also find, most likely, the FCC TLA expanded out for you in perfect American. You now may continue reading
Do we have a clue yet?
God, I hope so.
Re:the FCC, a historical rant (Score:1)
Re:Maybe I don't remember my history too well... (Score:2)
(Goddamn reality. Never stays where I put it.)
Anyway, some relevant quotations from Chairman Bruce:
The full text of this book is available on-line in various places. Here's one: The Hacker Crackdown [mit.edu]