FCC Chairman Carr Launches Deregulation Initiative | Hacker News Reader

FCC Chairman Carr Launches Deregulation Initiative

docs.fcc.gov

29 pointsimpish920815 comments

Items that are not obvious:

1. Removing part 68 certification & testing requirements for telecom devices.

2. Removing Part 15 certification & testing requirements for digital devices that have squarewaves of 1 KHz or higher.

Of all then agencies being compelled to abandon their reason for existence, the FCC joining the herd is troubling yet all I can do is shrug. The “efficiency by contrition” approach is completely contrary to the mandates given by the public at large for decades - and claiming this Administration’s actions reflect a genuine authorization is a blatant lie. A vast percentage of the US population are effectively told simple majority rule is the justification to dismantle functioning, worthwhile elements of the Federal Government, and that’s in many respects - the FCC will be a fascinating case study.

Let’s deregulate broadcast television so that supporters of this administration have even less recourse for policing morality on the airwaves. Let’s take away criminal punishments for high jacking AM or FM terrestrial radio broadcasts. Let’s see how they like it when their beloved Conservative Talk show radio programs are forcibly interrupted by Muslim calls to prayer six times per day. Some people just are so emotionally and intellectually deprived that facing the consequences of their actions, en masse, might be divine justice so to speak.

I'm actually really interested in the end-game.

My general experience is that people who've actual self-built an empire (ex. Bezos) are actually very aware of history + cause and effect. While the guy that needs to work overtime to afford groceries and gas is more likely to claim the government needs to get out of their medicaid.

So, Bezos et al should be extremely aware that the great depression was followed by a massive expansion of government under FDR. Even under Biden there are a lot of claims of a recesssion and the under Trump the USG is trying to cut exports (~11% of GDP) and USG spending (~25% of GDP). Like how are they not going to trigger a depression when going after 30% of the economy? Do they figure they have the government all locked up?

There are a couple of things that human’s in general are bad at, and intuition is unhelpful, even if you are otherwise an intelligent, learned person. Two I see pop up a lot are Statistics and Systems Thinking. In particular with Systems Thinking, people tend to assume that things that have a simple clear relationship at the scale they operate in, will have the same effect when applied at the scale of the system as a whole. Which is quite often not the case.

People can't predict in advance who will win a U.S. Preidential election with any accuracy but you are presuming people like Bezos are working from a long term master plan? He's probably improvising like everyone else.

> have even less recourse for policing morality on the airwaves

Of all the things isn't this helped by gutting the FCC? I wouldn't exactly call their policing of broadcast radio and television popular. To be clear I don't like any of this but trying to see a teeeny silver lining where network TV can be less bland. It's something (tm) I guess.

A lot of the damage might be mitigated by the fact that companies aren't going to roll out non-compliant devices if they expect in 4 years for this to all have been a bad dream. But if this flavor of Republican wins in '28 then I bet it sticks.

Since the announcement has basically no real content: Apart from net neutrality, what things are company execs drooling over after reading this? Bandwidth assignments? Wireless testing requirements? Spam restrictions?

This will only help big corporate companies. A vast majority of the regulatory hurdles from small to medium sized businesses come from aggressive legal strategies from the oligarchy. For example, OpenAI pushed hard to regulate AI for everyone but themselves and even tried to punish people for using the term "GPT" by attempting to trademark it [1][2]. Now that they've bullied, threatened, and consolidated the market, they're trying to push deregulation.

[1] https://gizmodo.com/openai-chatgpt-trademark-gpt-4-gpt-5-sam... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AIAssisted/comments/139rnnx/do_not_...

"Prosperity through deregulation" ROTFLOL

"a new wave of economic opportunity", eh?

First, I nominate scrapping this whole idea of frequency allocation to private parties. Regulation can't get more heavy-handed, askew, and favoring incumbents than designating that most everybody is prohibited from doing anything while some other parties may do whatever they like.

Second, I nominate removing every restriction on intentional and unintentional radiators. Those hooks have been used to create a whole extragovernmental regulatory apparatus of testing labs.

Third, the regulations requiring manufacturers to implement code signing on wireless chipsets. This maybe should have been first because it's so abhorrent to individual freedom, but the scope is narrow compared to the first two.

Also since we're talking about "economic opportunity" and Republicans have been complaining about regulatory agencies acting beyond their congressional mandate - now that they control congress, surely there is a net neutrality bill making its way through the legislative process?

My neck just twitched in a way it never has before. Thank you for that.

I nominate removing every restriction on intentional and unintentional radiators

This is quite an illuminating call to action, because it demonstrates the same process that lead to the current plague of anti-vax sentiment. Apparently it only takes a generation of people living with the benefit of a regulation for the essential lessons that led to the creation of the regulation to be forgotten. Sometimes it seems western civilization has indeed peaked and we are now doomed to these ever repeating cycles of ignorance.

To be clear my statements were all facetious with varying levels of seriousness, and that one was the least serious. The thrust being to point out the hypocrisy of the neofascists saying "reduce regulations" while they actually mean increasing centralized control over our lives.

Though I will say with all of the blind destruction going on, now wouldn't be the worst time to end up trying out those idealistic theories about larger adoption of spread spectrum...

There is too much momentum involved in this stuff for people who have no clue what they're doing to take the wheel. All it takes is a year of allowing emitting garbage on the market and we could cripple radio astronomy for a generation. Even if the problem is corrected as quickly as it can be on a governmental timescale, all these junk devices will be in circulation for decades.

It fees like we're already running that experiment in low level way? Like are all those GENSYM brands of gizmos on Amazon really passing EMC?

I remember when overbright non-FMVSS HID/LED headlights started becoming a thing, then the DOT cracked down on imports for a while (but never actually put a stop to it). Then they just seemingly just gave up, because it was impossible to actually stop. I figured the dynamic is similar with RF emissions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com