FCC fines Swarm $900K for unauthorized satellite launch
reuters.com
reuters.com
Uber and AirBnB are the classic examples (and it's worked out wonderfully for them). In Toronto, Car2Go told customers to just park anywhere- don't worry about getting parking tickets, we'll handle it. (They didn't). Swarm was told that their satellites could not be launched, so they just did it anyways hoping no one would notice. (Someone did). RobinHood announced checking accounts without checking if there were laws around such things. (There are).
Governments would be better to be ready for disruptive ideas and have flexibility in regulations to try them out. And we should all be voting and supporting candidates who want to see such changes happen. But until they do, it seems wrong to purposely break laws in order to make money.
Alcohol prohibition in the US didn't end because everyone stayed good and sober.
The solution is for gov fix the laws to reflect society. Unfortunately modern governments are designed around protecting established market cartels and political special interest groups over evolving with the times.
I don’t see this as relevant to Swarm either. They aren’t an evolution AFAIK, besides maybe the rise of private rocket launches.
You assume that because something is new that it is better. Hotel and taxi laws were put in place for a reason. Just because a new business comes along and doesn't want to play by the rules doesn't make that business right and the laws wrong.
In a civilization, it's up to the business to enumerate the reasons that the laws should be changed, and then go through the same legislative process as any other business or member of the public to have those laws changed.
Breaking the law and then blaming the law is like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum and expecting adults to feel bad for it.
That reason being to entrench the incumbent players by raising the barrier to competition.
And having laws requiring particular fare structures and payment methods is certainly meant to keep companies from competing with taxis.
What color is the sky in your world?
Should fire safety not apply to all large residential buildings? Why just hotels? Would generally applicable regulation not be better?
> And having laws requiring particular fare structures and payment methods is certainly meant to keep companies from competing with taxis.
At least in part.
Hotels have more strict fire safety laws because of the way they’re constructed and because there are more potential victims in a smaller space.
I will skull fuck a dead pig with a chicken shitting on my face before I ever try to use AirBnB again.
As for Uber. People complain that taxis are all just greedy fuckers who act like pricks to the customers, and then they expect a private company paying less than minimum wage to people will give them a better outcome. Let me know how that works out when Uber stops subsidising all the rides with VC money.
This is about enabling fair access to and good stewardship of a scarce resource.
Prohibition was the imposition of one form of morality through law.
In my view, it's easier to argue that one is about personal freedom and so fair game to consider breaking, whereas the other is more about being a good neighbour.
Activists were (with different language) very much worried about negative externalities and effects on the commons when it came to Prohibition.
Remember, people were getting rampantly drunk, fighting in the streets, neglecting their families, becoming unemployable, and so on. Beer/wine/spirits sellers were more than happy to promote drinking even with all the social problems produced by it.
It certainly didn't feel like a private matter at the time, like praying in your bedroom each night.
So "someone making a fortune while leaving the alcoholism and broken homes in its wake" would look very much then like "someone making a fortune while raiding the available housing units and ruining neighborhoods" does today.
Edit: And, to be sure, that doesn't mean Prohibition was a good idea. But means the right solution wasn't "free for all for alcohol", but "okay, you can sell alcohol, but with these rules to contain that problem".
The flaw with that argument is that something like 99 of 100 laws exist because, basically, they should. They benefit society, so essentially the whole population wants them.
Someone will disagree with almost every law, and some subset of them will violate it in protest. No single person knows which law is the 1 in 100 that shouldn't exist - even someone who thinks they know. Often, the people who so passionately think a law shouldn't exist that they're willing to break it are actually the least representative of society.
(I'm completely ignoring whether space launch access is or isn't a worthwhile law; it's moot.)
That's very much debatable. It's not even clear how to count the number of laws, even if we are only considering Federal law in the US. (see https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43056.pdf )
Certainly there is no one who knows all the laws, and unlike in coding, there's no commitment to DRY or modularization, which leads to very common unintended consequences.
You're arguing the 99/100 case, but I'm sure it would be easy to find someone to credibly argue the 1/100 case.
Where every person would individually benefit from breaking them, but the community as a whole would be worse off.
E.g. environmental regulations
There was an article on the front page last week [1] about the total cost to the economy from licensing “professional” work which can clearly be done safely and effectively without a license, for example, hair weaving.
While the direct cost of obtaining licenses and completing the educational requirires (which often provides no actual benefit in increased skill or earnings), is relatively low… If you factor in the cost to the economy of people who aren’t able to work at a more profitable profession because they are restricted from entering it due to the licensing, the cost was extraordinary.
I think any analysis which covers all the myriad misguided attempts government makes to micromanage our lives is going to blow far past 1/100 of laws and regulations being damaging rather than helpful, even when considering the general populace.
You have to pass a written and practical test (aka subjective test) - administered by other licensed florists (aka your competitors).
Licenses should be about public safety. There's no reason to have a subjective test when it comes to this.
It seems though in some industries (not all), as you allude to in the floral industry, that licensing is just another manifestation of rent seeking and ever encroaching regulatory capture.
Would you concur? Curious to hear what you think there could (or should) be done about it in your opinion? In the case of selling floral products-caveat lector: I know nothing about flowers other than they are pretty and smell nice-would it make sense to replace licensing with some sort of rating system for businesses to aid consumers in deciding who they want to procure professional services from based on assessed expertise and past services rendered (not Yelp, an assessment from your industry peers)?
+ E.g. a cheap electrician using aluminum wiring that may short in 10 years and burn the house down. But of which the customer may not be aware / informed.
I see licensing as buying into the system and aligning interests. Suddenly, it's in a tradesperson's personal interest to follow regulations, as they otherwise risk their right to practice.
That said... as was mentioned upthread, there's a happy balance. If there's limited long term harm, it's probably not justifiable to require licensure.
I think that's a good example of a field where lack of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. I'd have thought like you until having seen first hand what some such hair products can do.
I'm sure there are unnecessary licensing. But I'm equally sure a lot of the licensing that seems pointless actually has reasonable justifications that are just not obvious if you don't know the field.
Because if so, so far reading this, it seems the Federal government has a pretty solid, and measurable grip on that very activity, just from the text of the report, and it doesn't seem remarkably difficult for them since they've come up with seemingly multiple ways to delineate the different types of Federal rules from each other, and have been able to point to various methods used to come up with their final assessment totals.
None of it seemed overtly complicated or difficult, and I'm about as far removed from "well read" on government reports as a person can get.
As a general rule, these type of moves can only be controlled by breaking them and testing then in court. The agencies have a strong incentive to go for a maximal interpretation of the relevant statues and increase their influence and funding.
And we don’t control crimes like murder by allowing people to break the laws and then testing them in court.
I usually err on the side of constructive conversation, but I have to say that is a ridiculous straw-man - and you know it.
But they are still backed by actual laws, and are not lessened by being regulations - if anything they are better because you can always apply to the implementing authority to change things without going the whole parliamentary route.
There's a downside in less well developed countries without a tradition of a non-political civil service (like the US) where an incoming politician installs their political flunkies can change the regulations to suit their donors
Should the violence of the state be brought to bear on citizens because it is known that "most" laws are good? Would we benefit from a higher standard? Could we instead renew and expire laws?
Sometimes yes. But other times, the laws exists (and more than 1 of 100) to "protect" some industry (from competition from another industry) and not necessarily because it's a benefit to society / general public.
Not to get off topic, but this is the crux of the argument of (e.g.,) The Brothers Koch. That is, it's not gov they are against per se. But the fact that the gov leads to rules & reg that (too often) end up offering advantages to some and disadvantages to others - which is __not__ what should happen if benefit to society were the true goal. Put another way, they're not against gov per se. They're against the uneven playing field the gov is so fond of creating.
Note: I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with them. I only wanting to point out this finer-point is often lost when people scream "OMG...The Kochs...The Kochs...". The reality is, there's a fair amount of evidence / validity to their POV.
Personally, I'm reasonably happy laws against assault create disadvantages to some people.
This doesn't pass the smell test. You actually believe that over the history of the United States that legislatures had a 99% success rate at passing good legislation?
This United States has a history of civil disobedience for a reason and it's part of what makes the country great. The law isn't something to be venerated, it should be treated with respect up to a point and that point ends when the law ceases to be relevant.
Case in point look at how people from the migrant caravans are being treated, ICE and Border Patrol are following the law by the book, can you tell me that law is good?
Everyone has a different definition of which laws are “relevant”.
> ICE and Border Patrol are following the law by the book
Are they? I was under the impression that most of the outrage was around officers circumventing Constitutional checks and abusing their power.
Laws and government programs should have expiration dates. Government can choose to renew said laws and programs, but an expiration date (aka Sunsetting) is good policy because it forces government to stay currently relevant.
To your original point, I'd say that yes, a lot of laws exist because they solved some problem at the time they were introduced (or because someone acted corruptly, but let's ignore that for now). I believe in questioning laws, but when the argument is "it'd make our private endeavors more effective," then I'd carefully consider why the laws were there in the first place.
And even if it is 99 of of 100, does that mean we should ignore the 100th, which could be causing untold harm?
Please don't make it seem like Uber's law-breaking is some kind of brave sacrifice protecting mom-and-pop restaurants everywhere.
Startups in general seem to benefit just one category of people: investors, and it's usually to the detriment of Joe B. Average who happened to use their product/service.
One nearly killed me, but I don't judge all other drivers by his lack of sleep/attention/whatever prescription drugs he relies on to stay awake.
My issue with uber/etc is that they spend more money, campaigning against laws that would require background checks for their drivers, than it would cost for them to actually do the background checks. If that doesn't raise some questions for you, you may as well just look for vans with "free candy" spray painted on the side, I'm sure they'll be great.
"Taxis are terrible" is such a vague blanket statement its almost meaningless.
I've literally never "hailed" a taxi in my life - I've either gotten in one at a rank (i.e. at an airport) or called for one in advance (i.e. at a hotel). Even as someone who uses taxis very rarely, I'm well aware of taxi booking apps both here in Thailand and in Australia.
Your argument is essentially "American taxis are crap, therefore uber is good for breaking the law". Why exactly couldn't Uber have just operated as a better taxi company? Oh right. Because then they'd have to follow the laws, and pay the drivers an actual income.
You mean none of the existing holders will sell them? $22B. Twenty two billion fucking dollars. That's how much VC money has been pumped into this bullshit company. And you're saying they can't buy some taxi medallions?
The second reason was that not 1 of the non-Grab taxi drivers uses anything like Google Maps. So I was never sure if we actually ended up at our hotel or somewhere else. Also because our hotel (Aetas) had (at least) 2 locations in Bangkok it made it all worse. This is assuming that a taxi driver actually knows where to go, we've also encountered multiple times the situation where a taxi driver didn't know where to go.
Grab on the other hand always provided the amount upfront and every driver had Google Maps for navigation.
Edit: I'd rather use the official taxis, but the number of conveniences Grab added with a single app was worth it to me.
> I've either gotten in one at a rank (i.e. at an airport) or called for one in advance (i.e. at a hotel)
But even when I have traveled, I generally don't use taxis much. I've only ever been to a few countries where I didn't end up driving - Hong Kong and Singapore, where public transport is beyond amazing, and a wedding (and thus spent the whole time at a resort) in Fiji years ago.
The taxi industry was hurt the most, but it wasn't taxi laws that were broken it was chauffeur laws.
They weren't banned in the UK. Or London. Their application for a license renewal was temporarily denied in London. They appealed, once.
They worked with TfL to resolve their concerns and were granted a new license - though slightly shorter term than normal. They're not entirely off the hook and will need to continue to show that they're behaving appropriately, but they're absolutely fine to operate now and that is not likely to change any time soon.
In my observation, startups aren't just breaking unjust laws.
Sometimes it does take a little pressure.
Make it too easy to repeal laws, and anti-corporate interest laws that were difficult to pass find themselves quietly unwritten soon after.
A difficult game theory problem.
I'm not saying that regulatory capture is not a problem; that would be an absurd claim. But trying to make the law about right and wrong is not the solution.
I wonder what Thoreau would think about all this. He wrote Civil Disobedience which grapples with these ideas, but I bet he didn't imagine them in this new market/corporate context.
Laws are just a contract. There are terms and penalties. If you weigh the consequences of breaking the contract and decide it’s worth the risk why not do it? Most people in America do it everyday (speeding in their cars).
Textbook example of how a career criminal thinks.
A part of being an entrepreneur is that you have take risks from time to time, and under term "risk" I don't mean business risks.
The law cares, but realistically those regulations are in place to prevent fraud or dysfunctional products. If Theranos' machine actually did what they said it could, it would've been a victimless crime and I wouldn't have a problem with it.
It was possible to make products which benefited humanity before those regulations existed, and it's possible to do the same while skirting those regulations.
A lot of the regulations around laboratories exist because people have died or been injured as a result of lab screwups. Theranos hid entire labs from inspectors, let uncertified people run laboratories, and a lot more that wasn't fraud, but definitely violated regulatory requirements.
But again, I think it's morally fine for an uncertified person to run a laboratory as long as they are running it correctly. But the Theranos labs were not being run correctly, and they were lying about the results that their machines could deliver.
You can build a medical product that has a higher sensitivity and/or specificity than the other products on the market without regulatory oversight. But the Edison had neither of those and they were pretending it did. That was the problem.
How do you determine if they're "running it correctly"?
The whole point of certification is to require a minimum set of skills/knowledge to do so.
Insert "faster" or "cheaper" as well, but that is my point. There are very clear ways to measure if your medical device is effective.
What? No!
That's the equivalent of the mythical software rewrite that fixes all current issues: three are a lot of reason why we have customer and environmental protections and even if some are forgotten throwing them out without because "disruption is good" strikes me as quite naive.
The law is a messy area. Many places are simply unresolved until a court gets to them, and often there is no incentive for that resolution to happen, so the question gets a lot more complicated.
Here's an example (In all of this I'm trying to focus on legality and not if I think it's a good thing. I'm also not a lawyer and likely have lots of details wrong). I get around to saying why this is relevant at the end of this wall of text.
In the world of tabletop RPGs (D&D and the like) there's a big grey area as to what is/isn't protected by copyright.
From general literature, we know (indeed, it was one of the big pushes for the creation of copyright) that translations and other "derivative works" are covered by copyright.
From boardgames, we know (have court cases saying) that _rules_ aren't copyrightable, while the exact expression of them are. I can make a Monopoly clone so long as I don't violate any trademarks (which are different than copyright) and use my own words to express the rules.
From comics and other literature, we know that characters and settings can be covered as "derivative works". I cannot write my own Superman take, nor have a story involving Superman and the Justice League even if I omit/replace the exact trademarked words. Three notes: (1) Parody is an allowed defense against copyright infringement and (2) A lot of stuff happened in the early years of comics that today would likely not fly today. (3) Given the universality of themes, there's lots of dispute about what creative works are or are not derivative, in both a legal and non-legal sense.
But a tabletop RPG lives in a weird place: it is rules...for telling a story. It may come with characters and a setting...with the intention that people use them. Is my use of the product creating a "derivative work"? If I make an adventure that assumes you are using the rules but doesn't include any of the text, is that a derivative work? Does that change if I refer to setting details?
For a long while, the expectation was that, no, if you avoided trademark infringement and didn't copy exact text, you weren't infringing. Several RPG magazines would buy (from freelance authors) and sell (as the magazine to subscribers) adventures for various different systems. [Notable exception: Palladium games, maker of Rifts, TMNT, and other (ahem) strangeness) were very prickly about this, so magazines simply skipped them and didn't offer adventures for them.] Heck, adventures were such a cost sink for game publishers and so requested (but unbought) by audiences, it was generally considered a SERVICE to the publisher to put out adventures for their material, as it would drive demand for their books.
Now, this was the genre-wide expectation (excluding Palladium), but it was never actually legally established. RPG companies were (and often still are) shoestring budget operations, and a bad judgement (and if I learned one thing from my lawyer friends, it's that initial court decisions are often bad judgements - it's why appellate courts are so important) would devastate many companies and the hobby that relies on them. Heck, just going to court would destroy most companies at the time, even if they'd eventually win. So the law in the area was allowed to continue undefined, with the few cases that cropped up almost always (always?) settling out of court.
Side note: Think games aren't terribly relevant to the law? Check out how the EFF came to be in relation to tabletop RPGs: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/
Then Wizards of the Coast (The Magic: The Gathering people) bought TSR (The Dungeons and Dragons people) and came out with D&D 3rd edition. This is when Linux was breaking free from the "you get what you pay for" stigma, when "open source" was a new term (vs free software), and when Stallman vs Raymond had just finished peaking. The concept of open licensing and copyleft was getting a broader awareness, and tech and RPGs have always had a tight bond, so when D&D introduce the Open Gaming License (OGL), to set explicit rules to allow derivative works, it was a big deal.
The OGL did a lot of things. It spawned a revolution in the RPG market that would bring in a lot of new players, spawned a bunch of new companies - most of whom folded just as quickly, but a few modern companies made their start then and survived - crushed or crippled some relative giants in the industry, dealt a blow (due to unsold product) to the RPG stores that were already reeling from the correction in the trading card industry...and normalized new intellectual property practices.
The OGL made it clear what was allowed to be done, and even allowed activities that distinctly required permission under copyright...IF you accepted limitations that are probably more than copyright would ever require. If there are gaming magazines (or 'zines, or any other commercial enterprise) that offer adventures without explicit license, I don't know of them. Similarly, character creation programs and the like all operate under explicit license now...because we're never figured out if they need to.
Bringing this all back to the original point: "move fast and break things" in terms of the law has two possible ends: you either tick off the established players and they bring the law against you and resolve the legal vagueness one way or the other, OR you establish a new norm because no one has the resources to challenge you (and if they did, the fact that you created an accepted norm makes it more likely that the law will accept that as the norm: See how EULAs have crazily become enforceable without even offering refunds if you don't accept in most situations).
End conclusion: Is "move fast and break the law" good? I really don't know. I feel like ending vagueness is good, but I feel like allowing initial corporate actors to define the starting point of the new rules is bad. Either way, I feel like it's a different situation when you're dealing with legal vagueness than when dealing with clear established laws in the Uber and AirBnB situations, but even in those cases the "little guys" weren't going to be able to impact the law without a clear market demand...and yet, I don't like encouraging companies to play fast and loose.
Messy.
Actually the related mantra of "Hey as long as it's just a fine you can reasonably pay -- or you don't think you'll get caught -- then sure, go ahead an break the law!" has been around the Valley for quite a while. In fact, we might say it's become something of a chant.
I think some need to be made an example of.
As long as the regulations of the US don’t make sense, smart people will continue to break them in the spirit of innovation. Will this breaking of regulation always end in relatively little consequence? No, and soon the FCC or another regulatory body will feel obligated to make an example out of some company with serious charges and I will feel bad for the CEO and company that is used for an example
When we were young lots of rules didn't make sense. As we got older we realized many of these were to keep us safe from things we weren't old enough to understand yet.
The US has quite a number of spy satellites that we can't detect, even with our own detection methods. Some are covered in vantablack and radar absorbing shields, others hide behind giant mirrors that reflect the darkness of space back down towards the earth.
How would your opinion change if a Swarm microsat had crashed in to a 6 billion dollar satellite and disabled it? What if it threw that bird out of orbit and it hit the ISS, killing everyone on board?
I really have no problem with people or companies evaluating risk/reward and pursuing whatever goal they want... if you want to disincentivize behavior then increase the penalty and change the risk/reward calculation individuals and corporations make.
Everything from slave laws to miscegenation laws to gay laws had to be broken first before they could be changed. The one of the central aspects of the civil rights movement was breaking laws - ie rosa parks.
Also, this is hacker news and the hacking community generally isn't fond of restrictive laws and regulations.
The fact is that all the examples in the grand parent post involved businesses that could have operated legally but chose not to because they could make the economic decision to break laws to profit from fast expansion. In my view laws should be written with penalties to prevent people from breaking them, not as some sort of toll booth.
The fines, by contrast, seem to be working pretty well: how many other companies get busted by the FCC for violating satellite launching regulations? The fact that it is so rare is a testament to how effective the deterrent has been in regulating companies in this space.
I’m all in favour of civil disobedience when laws are stupid but breaking laws just to make a fast buck isn’t the same as defying inequality.
One is clearly immoral and no one would question the validity of civil disobedience as a method to over throw immoral laws. The comparison here is not a good one at all, these are two different things.
seems a foregone conclusion - aren't these laws designed around some situation in the first place? why not just not write them in the first place? except that would be negligent..
After all, FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said the size of the penalty “is probably not significant enough to deter future behavior". I'd guess that Swarm knew someone would notice and they knew the fine would be worth paying in lieu of dealing with the red tape needed to get the launch authorized.
Now the question is, what penalty is significant enough to deter this behavior and why isn't that the penalty presently?
To me, this reads like they're abdicating their responsibility. I'm sure their goal is to punish the company without destroying it. But if even the regulator doesn't believe the fine is going to serve as a deterrent, why do we even have a regulator for this arena?
If you're a VC or company backer now, how willing are you to put your money behind some company that's liable to be the second intentional violator of these regulations?
If the regulatory agency will tailor-make your fine to make sure that it's not too stiff, I don't see why any startup would follow the rules the first time around. Compliance has costs.
If you ignore compliance and your project doesn't work, then you spared yourself the time and money needed for compliance, and you won't care about the fine.
If you ignore compliance and your project does work, then the fine will not kill you, and you'll know it's worth coming into compliance.
I don't think I'm more "move fast and break things" than the average HN'er; this just seems like the logical outcome of fines that are intentionally too small. What am I overlooking?
I wouldn't want the FCC to have arbitrary and unlimited power.
New companies with new ideas can get their first projects off the ground cheaply. As they become established and do more projects, they abide by the rules. There's only a small number of "rule-breaking" projects, and plenty of scope for innovation.
Where's the problem?
A little later: the FCC said we couldn't do that with LLCs that we own or are directed by people who work for us, so let's hire a series of unconnected LLCs, one per launch. We'll have to pay a bit more, but it's always the first launch. We just sell them satellites and connect them with buyers.
A little later: oops, Ajit Pai is doing community service for the rest of his life. Let's find a new loophole.
A second, slightly less important problem is that this turns markets into government-sponsored winner takes all, even when the market conditions aren't pushing for that.
To the larger point, though, even an imperfect regulator is important. There will always be different types of businesses - those who intend to skirt the law and those who attempt to follow it whatever it may be - and regulators keep the second set from acting like the first set, reducing the quantity of bad behavior. They certainly wish they had the fangs to deter both, but at least this may deter the latter.
It's a lot harder to say "we thought it was OK" now.
I worked for a different smallsat company, including working on the FCC application and it was a nightmare dealing with them. We submitted our initial application for a license, got comments back from the FCC and then we provided them with more data in response to their questions. Then after 2 years of the FCC just sitting on our license application we got a 3 sentence letter saying out application had been denied with no explanation of why.
There are quite a few OSCAR satellites in higher orbits that have longer lifetimes. But most of them are still low enough that they will meet the de-orbit requirements of 25 years without any propulsion or other de-orbit device [1]. De-orbit times depend on ballistic coefficient of the satellite, drag profile, and current atmospheric density. But generally speaking, satellites in orbits lower than 600 km will de-oribt within the 25 year requirement [2].
The 25 year disposal requirement is also only an issue if you are in a desirable or full orbital plane. The OSCAR satellites that have much longer lifetimes are above 1000 km altitude and will effectively stay up there forever. They are out of the way of most of the commercial and civil earth observation satellites which are in the 600 km to 750 km range. This is the range where the issue of orbital debris gets more difficult. And yes it is good that the FCC should require technical rationale as to why the de-orbit strategy is sufficient. However, in my experience this has been a terrible process with the FCC specifically. I have also worked with satellite operators in England getting approvals from the ITU and it is a much smoother process.
[1] https://www.n2yo.com/satellites/?c=18&srt=3&dir=0 [2] https://aiaa.kavi.com/apps/group_public/download.php/3172/IS...
Aside from a massive fine, is there anything else they could have done? Could they have jailed the executives and investors? Could they have revoked their corporate charter?
Probably not. https://www.justice.gov/jm/criminal-resource-manual-1068-vio...
> and investors?
Passive investors? No
> Could they have revoked their corporate charter?
The Commission couldn't, no. Corporate entity revocation (dissolution) is more a thing that happens when the entity fails to pay fees to a state or territory than it is a punishment: It's intentionally trivially easy to create corporate entities.
Seems to me that future companies that want to do this sort of testing just need to do it in other countries or from off-shore platforms. Then apply for your FCC license so you can charge US customers without having to worry about getting sanctioned (and losing your ability to process credit cards and bank in the US).
When I started reading the article and read about all these international launches my first thought was, "why does the FCC have a say in any of this?" Now I'm thinking, "perhaps we need a better international framework for this sort of thing."
If Swarm had been based in India, it would have needed to seek authorisation there. Swarm requested FCC authorisation which was denied on the basis of collision safety.
They then received permission to launch a set of larger satellites with better radar visibility. Imagine the surprise of the FCC when they discovered that Swarm had lied to their launch provider (claiming that they had authorisation) and launched the original satellites anyway!
In the past this has never been an issue because satellites were so expensive that no-one in their right mind would try to launch one without authorisation. As a result, launch providers may not have been rigorous in actually checking the authorisations for their secondary payloads.
The whole model is still rooted in a world where only a few countries could launch satellites and only a small number of very large companies within them could afford to build and launch them. Within a cosy world like that, regulatory compliance is important but it is also assumed that everyone else is complying and actually checking that is rare. Certainly this case is going to change that.
This is just straight-up illegal.
In this case, Swarm lied to the Indian government and said the US had approved it (which made sense as they are a US-based company), while trying to hide the existence of the satellites from the US Government. Frankly, I think a $900k fine is too small.
Yes, the actual judgment document just vaguely refers to it as "Georgia" but it's inferred that it's the state since FCC has no statutory authority outside of the U.S. However in the application it's clearly marked as state of Georgia.
"Swarm seeks narrow authority to transmit data from the SpaceBEE satellites in order to access tracking information. The SpaceBEE satellites will only transmit to enable downlinking of GPS data, and will be muted at all other times. GPS data will be downlinked during passes over Los Altos, California and Buford, Georgia. These passes Swarm Technologies will occur approximately four times per day. Each transmission will require approximately two seconds."
[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-18-184A1.pdf
https://jobs.lever.co/swarm-technologies/437b187b-26f9-4da7-...
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience preparing and submitting FCC applications for satellite and/or earth station licenses.
This feels like a pretty important point - Swarm got slapped for their mistakes with that launch, but they're already back on track if the FCC already granted permission (what must have been months ago) for their most recent satellites. I wonder if it was just down to confusion on Swarm's part on how the rules applied.
I think part of the reason that they were able to still get licenses approved is that they agreed to more oversight from the FCC. Also, after launching the satellites Swarm was able to show the FCC that they were able to track the satellites, which was the original reason that FCC denied the license. So it seems like the FCC had to say "we were wrong, but you still broke the law so here is a fine and then we will continue on with life."
NASA (and other space agencies) are OK with their satellites. The FCC is not OK with their use of controlled spectrum in the US.
The FCC regulates the radio spectrum usage in the US, which means if you want to talk to your satellite you need to get permission from them. They use that to try and make sure everyone in space gets along and don't crash into each other.
If the company only ever used base stations not falling under FCC jurisdiction they might have been ok, but my guess is that as long as they were operating in the US they'd probably run into issues trying to get around the FCC.
Evade the FCC and someone with enforcement powers is still gonna be grumpy.
For space there are UN agencies that are responsible and there are several international treaties, agreements and conventions:
On an international level, the ITU [1] sets guidelines for spectrum usage and de-orbit. But each country typically has their own regulatory agency depending on where the satellite was built.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunicatio...
Well, how about applying those, then?
I also think you’re misunderstanding the sentiment. It’s not so much about negative coverage serving as additional punishment in this case, but about the coverage putting future would-be offenders on notice, and effectively preventing any profession of ignorance to serve as a mitigating factor.
good advice Mr Genachowski..
The UK basically rolled their eyes the same way they'd ignore a kid declaring their backyard tree fort to be sovereign territory. If they'd started launching rockets, that might've been different.
Would that simple fact not incentive you to question your assumptions of either the burden of regulation, or the possibility of end-runs around the law with cheap stunts, before furthering this strange case of “jingoism with no nation”?
> FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said the size of the penalty “is probably not significant enough to deter future behavior, but the negative press coverage is likely to prevent this company and others from attempting to do this again.”
The next one would surly be treated much harder, considering it would be hard to claim ignorance. And fines would also rise proportional with the size of the offender, not to menation repeat offenders.
But the FCC already told them to go f-off, and they launched anyway.
"Swarm launched the satellites in India last January after the FCC rejected its application to deploy and operate them, citing concerns about the company’s tracking ability."
This isn't a deterrant, it can be framed as the cost of doing business.
The fine is far too small.
https://www.libertarianism.org/podcasts/free-thoughts/sad-hi...