Lessig: It's Time to Demolish the FCC | Hacker News Reader

Lessig: It's Time to Demolish the FCC

newsweek.com

21 pointsraju7 comments

I support your idea, Mr. Lessig, but good luck with that.

The people working for the FCC have much more political pull and much more incentive to lobby (it's their jobs on the line) than any third party do-gooder. It will take a huge publicity campaign before the costs of doing nothing outweigh the benefit for a given Congress person.

You can always add a new bureaucracy, but it is hard to take away an old one. That's the incentive structure in a bureaucratic democracy.

Yeah, we already allowed FDA to look the other way in order to "boost innovation" which resulted in virtual disappearance of fruit and vegetables from nearly all American grocery stores, they got replaced by engineered tasteless cheap biomass that only visually resembles the originals. Some Americans I know haven't ever tasted a tomato in their life. We even pushed EU using our WTO muscle to force-feed them genetically modified bananas (even though they really preferred the real thing) to support our suffering enterprises. I recommend "The Blessed Unrest" as an introductory reading on what happens when you let enterprises to get too creative.

Do you know that it is FCC that keeps you from being eaten alive by your friendly cable company? It's FCC who has been forcing them to open up and free us from those retarded cable boxes. It is FCC who is fighting the war against cable morons to eventually allow us simply hook up our computers and watch Hi-def unencrypted TV.

Telecom industry is prone to "natural monopolies". How many cable companies do you have to choose from? How about landline phone lines? Someone needs to watch these assholes.

FCC may do a lot of good things, but those get trumped by their enforcement of morality on everyone. I mean really, its the year 2009 almost, and you can't even say the word shit on TV without being bleeped.

"Someone needs to watch these assholes."

So true. I usually agree with Lessig about most issues, but this one, not so much.

Media consolidation is bad. Why demolish the FCC? First of all, the FCC might as well not even exist for all it has done to "open up" competition or competitive pricing. "On June 2, 2003 the Federal Communications Commission voted to relax certain market ownership restrictions." (http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/fccchanges.html) That, coupled with the already sorry state of media ownership in 2000 spelled disaster.

http://www.mediachannel.org/ownership/chart.shtml

When the laws that had originally been implemented to prevent monopolistic behavior were relaxed, these media giants were allowed to get even bigger, things really snowballed downhill. I don't know anybody who has actually received cheaper service rates from any of the major telecoms. Fewer commercials? Not that either. Most of us have actually noticed a significant increase in the amount we're paying for everything from cell phone service to land lines to cable, and on top if it all, more commercials.

What I would give to have real fruit again. I don't think many Americans realize what they are missing out on when it comes to food (especially fruit).

I know. I live in Texas and my wife after years of eating American biomass decided to start a garden and grow our own. Didn't work: the seeds they sell everywhere are altered junk: the results are a little better (after all the soil is real) but due to genetic modification everything still grows too fast and too big, devoid, of course, of any taste.

Corporate innovation at work.

The problem with mentioning a few anecdotal examples to show why we need more government regulation in a given area is they are just that, anecdotal. Here's an (anecdotal) counter to your take on the FDA:

Chicago Tribune - Stop the government's mad cow disease test ban - http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/chicago42304.cfm

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