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Comment by craftyguy | Hacker News Reader

The FCC should be disbanded and replaced with a new regulatory body that is elected by the people (either directly or by elected representation).

Even though they could do good, and may have in the past, the lack of actual accountability for their actions means that it's too easy to do bad. They're not directly elected, so even the tiny shred of accountability that elected officials generally have is not there. If they can flat out lie to the public and get away with it, why do they exist and why should they continue to exist?

The justification for the existence of a government organization should not be based on the possibilities of good they might do, but it should be based on the unchecked bad they could (and will eventually) do.

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Don't fall into their trap of "look how terrible government is (when officials are actively trying to run it into the ground)".

Fix the issues with officials lying, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

How do you propose we fix the government when the government is trying to run the government into the ground and the only way to fix it is through the government?

> Fix the issues with officials lying

The only way to do that is by either 1: prosecuting them or 2: disbanding the FCC and forming a new regulatory body that is elected by the people (either directly or by elected representation). I was advocating for #2. #1 is largely a joke when targeting high ranking officials.

Electing the FCC makes no sense. The rules are set by Congress, who we do elect. The FCC interprets and enforces those rules, but if they make poor decisions, Congress can change the rules.

To pile onto this comment, the Republicans in Congress can join the Democrats any time they want to and ensgrine net neutrality as the law of the land.

What's wrong with prosecuting public officials who lie to the public? Make all official statements de facto under oath.

The futility of trying to equivocate truth was illustrated by the Clinton trial, or taking any community college philosophy class.

And yet, trials exist.

With predictable outcomes. Liars avoid prosecution and weasel out of consequence, even with dedicated decisioning.

This is why I prefer direct democracy and polling about policies to voting for representatives.

Actual statistical sampling can be applied instead of a bunch of crap, gerrymandering and lobbying.

We first need to get people to care and be involved. Apparently, under a third of the colonists actually supported independence from England. If I mention repealing CFAA, I can't find anyone to support the idea. I think the topic would never pass any committee much less on the floor.

FCC does nothing that citizens need or want done. For it to be shuttered would harm only those who have invested billions in the fake "assets" that FCC invented and must constantly police.

It isn't the 1930s anymore. Modern radio technology could enable a much more complete utilization of spectrum. FCC's primary mission at this time is to delay that happy day as long as possible. "Happy" because with true competition, the consumer would forget that net neutrality was ever anything a government agency needed to enforce. Don't like how your WISP is handling your traffic? Just switch to one of the other 25 WISPs in your area.

It's true that if FCC were eliminated to the general benefit of the nation, curious citizens would wonder what else could be eliminated. Should we feel sorry for any organization unable to justify its own purpose and actions?

I think you're underestimating how constrained the radio spectrum actually is. There's not enough room for 25 WISPs.

I can see (and, with the right tools, connect to) more than 25 WiFi APs from my office. The reason "there isn't enough room" in other bands is because we haven't really tried. Developing the tech is expensive, so investors will be sure there is an application before investing. In Wifi, a tiny sliver of "whoops why the hell did we leave that open oh yeah microwave ovens damn that's inconvenient" spectrum that no one who could get a meeting with FCC wanted, lots of wonderful and unpredicted things have happened. It seems we get another 802.11 letter every couple of years now. Those engineers don't need supervision from the feds. They wouldn't need supervision on a larger chunk of spectrum either.

Intentional transmitters are very heavily regulated, even in the 2.4GHz band.

You actually do get very significant contention between 25 WiFi APs, or even 12. 2.4 GHz only supports 11 channels; any more simultaneous users than that and you get collisions, which requires packet retransmission and can severely increase latency. That's a large part of the reason why everyone has dual-band APs now - 2.4GHz got so congested that people needed more spectrum, so they got 5GHz routers to avoid the congestion (and then all their neighbors got 5GHz as well, nullifying some of the effect). If you have a dual-band router in an urban area and sometimes find that your YouTube videos keep buffering, try switching bands; oftentimes when 2.4GHz is unusable, 5GHz will be clear, and vice versa.

And those 11 channels overlap and aren't real full channels. You essentially only get 3 real channels.

> Those engineers don't need supervision from the feds

The FCC limits broadcast strength on the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band as well. Remove that limit and 2.4 GHz wifi will finally become pure noise as everyone tries to down each other out (it's already pretty much useless in a dense apartment building)

With 25 visible APs, chances are your wireless performance is shit, whatever you say about it subjectively.

I strongly disagree with the idea that specrim doesn't need assigned.

There are fudemental mathematical limits to how much data can be sent over a range of frequency. We aren't all that far from it. Even without that, what are you picturing everything coming with enough smarts and flexibility to decide what frequency to use and then use it.

What about people acting in bad faith, cell phone jamming ect.

> FCC does nothing that citizens need or want done.

I wanted net neutrality the first time it was implemented. I remember being excited about a few other regulations that the Wheeler FCC implemented.

They "implemented" it a year before that president left office, knowing the next administration would roll it back. It didn't even actually get out of the courts, so the implementation never affected anything. A fairly cheap signal of virtue...

Net neutrality is the origin and the genesis of the Internet.

It's baked into TCP/IP with packet agnosticism the central and guiding principle.

You've given into partisan ignorance and I can't fault you: it's typical of people all around the world to wrap themselves in comforting ignorance lest they be forced to exercise even a small portion of their brains.

*And thanks for finally coming clean in your own regard. I realized who I replied to after I posted my own reply to your 'content.'

Yes I'm partisan in that I'd like for us to be rid of both wings of the mainstream party. In the context of this thread "net neutrality" has been a regulation. Of course as a design consideration it is fundamental to how the internet is built, and of course it's an abomination that none of the ISPs available to me feel that way. I don't judge things by the marketing, FCC included. If FCC fixed any number of the many things they do wrong, I'd have to change my tune. I don't expect to have to do that...

I'm not sure what other reply you're referencing.

That's a mischaracterization of what happened.

Traditional telephone telecoms were always common carriers under Title II, and that applied to internet over dialup during the 90s. When broadband meant that internet connectivity was now being delivered via other medium, the FCC enforced what we now call net neutrality via a lighter regulatory scheme. Verizon ironically sued to get the courts to say that the FCC couldn't enforce the rules in a lighter scheme and therefore had to declare the new internet connectivity infrastructure to be full Title II common carriers to apply any of those rules to them. That court case ended in 2014, and so the FCC followed the court recommendation to apply the rules the were already enforcing.

Long story short: there was never really a time with both consumer internet connectivity and no net neutrality, despite the right wing talking points that this is some new thing.

Thread parent specifically credited Wheeler. I assumed that was for what Wheeler did in 2015? In my opinion (of course everyone is welcome to her own!) that action was calculated for reversal. In fact the whole "our backs are to the wall since VZN sued us" kabuki performance was planned years in advance. Big telcos are plugged into the parts of USA government that don't face reelection. They can bring extraordinary pressure to bear on judges and bureaucrats. Nobody in that system wants thousands of wildcat WISPs dotting the countryside.

I agree that the AM talk goofballs are full of shit on most things they say about the internet.

> FCC does nothing that citizens need or want done.

Keeping emergency bands clear is something the general populace wants done and frankly, needs done.

How is no FCC better than the current FCC? How would you propose we regulate the use of radio bandwidth? Cell phones, wifi, bluetooth, all would be impossible without the FCC. Net neutrality can never be enforced by a non-existing entity. Congress ultimately has the final say over what the FCC may or may not decide. The accountability is there. If the current rules are broken, that's a problem to fix, not to give up on.

> Cell phones, wifi, bluetooth, all would be impossible without the FCC

It sounds like you need to read up on the vast regulatory difference between cell bands and wifi.

edit: I can't fathom why I'm being downvoted. Without the FCC we would have much faster wifi, not being confined to a few tiny slices of spectrum. But cell service is debatable. And radio astronomy would be fucked.

The ISM bands are a shitshow. Some people legitimately need licensed spectrum.

I didn't say anything to the contrary.

I'd personally like to see a lot more public spectrum (say half of what was reclaimed from that DTV switchover [0]). But I respect there are many applications that do need dedicated spectrum, hence my reference to radio astronomy. Basic emergency comms that want the least possible protocol complexity is another.

It's just not a very informed opinion to think the FCC effected wifi/bluetooth, rather than having merely gotten out of the way.

[0] Or, if concerned it would merely end up a permanently unusable swamp due to the propagation, at least run an initial experiment with a tiny slice.

Yes, by all means take small steps. Those would still be progress! We might learn something about the right and wrong ways to deregulate spectrum. Up until now we've just been assuming that it can't be done, despite the WiFi's clear example of it being done well.

It is sort of hilarious that WiFi would be presented as an argument for FCC...

Eventually radio astronomy will take place in space, right? Besides, only really old-fashioned stuff like AM/FM can really interfere with astronomy more than a tiny increase in the overall noise level.

This is unfortunately not true for radio astronomy, the receivers are very sensitive, and will show interference from even a simple LCD screen within a mile. At frequencies below 1 GHz, the VLA often has to throw away more than half of the data due to interference.

Most observations happen outside of the protected bands, nature uses the whole spectrum, although the absolute most important bands are protected, like the 1420 MHz hydrogen line. For comparison, if you put a cell phone on the surface of the moon, it would be the brighter than the brightest natural source at 2 GHz. FM bands are wiped out, but some experiments where it is really important (the epoch of reionization) are put specifically in Western Australia or South Africa where it's wasteland and they protect the sites from interference.

With no FCC to hold back use of modern radio technology, we could all choose from among dozens of WISPs. Net neutrality would be table stakes from most of those, because actual competition. The FCC does nothing in the WiFi space, and that space is flourishing. If they did nothing over the entire spectrum, the entire spectrum would flourish (eventually).

> The FCC does nothing in the WiFi space

Who regulates the power limits on consumer WiFi devices? You think it’s the goodness of device makers’ hearts that keeps them from screaming across county lines?

Better radio tech can deal with higher noise floors. It's not as if the military has to ground their planes whenever the bad foreign leader du jour cranks up his WiFi...

I know there would be a transition period during which people would be pissed off that FM had gone away. After we got through that transition, we would enjoy many benefits.

> It's not as if the military has to ground their planes whenever the bad foreign leader du jour cranks up his WiFi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

That link seems to describe a hack of a vulnerable C&C protocol rather than basic radio interference?

They jammed the the C&C and encrypted military GPS and spoofed the civilian fallback GPS to run it into the ground.

Well, regulatory capture is the problem here [1]. The FCC crooks were appointed by elected crooks. If the US didn't elect crooks, we wouldn't have this FCC.

Electing crooks, of course, is a very old tradition. When it's blunt, it looks like the Credit Mobilier scandal in 1867 [2]. When it's a little more subtle, it might look like LBJ destroying Leland Olds' reputation to keep him off the Federal Power Commission [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_of_Americ...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leland_Olds#Unsuccessful_re-no...

Everything that you say here about the FCC could also be applied to other agencies. I think what was going on at the EPA was even worse for the simple fact that their regulations can actually have a positive or negative effect on the lives of the citizens it is responsible. While we as internet addicted citizens feel that the network is important, I think it is lower on the list. Not at all trying to diminish the fight against the FCC. I just think the EPA is even more important.

Well, Pai was appointed by Trump so in a sense he was chosen by voters, albeit indirectly. If we vote a different president into office then Pai will be replaced. A vote for one party in a race to control the Presidency really is a vote for control of that entire branch, including the officials it appoints. But it's a shame most Americans don't think about politics this way. Ultimately we get the government we deserve.

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