Subcasting

So if think that radio sucks, you've got three choices: 1) suffer; 2) wait for the FCC and the consumer electronics industry to work things out; and 3) follow Scoop Nisker's perfect advice: If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own. Unless I'm severely mistaken, choice #3 is also the Open Source Imperative.

But before we get to the What We Can Do part of this essay, let's look at Choice #2, because neither the FCC nor the consumer electronics business, which now includes the makers of do-it-all cellular phones, are idle on the matter.

First the FCC. Or, more to the point, Congress and the FCC. Not long after Janet Jackson's breast briefly upstaged viewers' beer and chips during Superbowl halftime, the House of Representatives pased H.R. 3717, the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, by a vote of 391-22. The Senate version of the bill, S. 2056, was approved by the Commerce Committee, with much piling-on of amendments, in March. Its purpose is "To increase the penalties for violations by television and radio broadcasters of the prohibitions against transmissions of obscene, indecent, and profane material, and for other purposes." Fines by the FCC, says the current Senate bill, "shall not exceed $275,000 for each violation or day of such violation, to a maximum of $3 million for any single act or failure to act." That's ony a slight modification of the bill that passed the house, which raised fines against offending individuals from $11,000 to $500,000, and against offending stations from $27,500 to $500,000. The chilling effects are already severe. Rock songs played for dozens of years are being pulled from playlists or altered to eliminate offending "content". Sales of tape-delay machinery to radio and TV stations are going through the roof. Disc jockeys are being forced to sign contracts to take personal liability for "indecent material" aired on their shows. Clear Channel, the biggest radio station owner, kicked Howard Stern off every station that carried him (for an infraction so trivial that I missed it when I was listening that morning), instituted a new decency policy, and made a record-setting $2 million settlement with the FCC.

The current FCC relishes its role as national nanny. "Obscenity" and "Indecency" have pouted prominently from its index page for many months. Its parents/content.html page, titled Obscenity, Indecency & Profanity, says,

It’s against the Law!
It is a violation of federal law to broadcast obscene programming at any time. It is also a violation of federal law to broadcast indecent programming during certain hours. Congress has given the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the responsibility for administratively enforcing the law that governs these types of broadcasts. The Commission may revoke a station license, impose a monetary forfeiture, withhold or place conditions on the renewal of a broadcast license, or issue a warning, for the broadcast of obscene or indecent material.

It continues,

Obscene speech is not protected by the First Amendment and cannot be broadcast at any time. To be obscene, material must meet a three-prong test:

"Prongs," huh? Isn't that a little... suggestive?

The key word here is "material". To Congress and the FCC, broadcasting isn't speech. It's transport. It's a delivery system for "material" or "content".

FCC Chairman Michael Powell explained this in a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters:

Given the free over the air nature of the medium, consumers do not express any prior consent to receive certain sounds and images — at least not to the extent they do with cable or rented videos, for example.

The First Amendment is cherished, but it bends only for you among media services. The Supreme Court and countless legal decisions create a special exception that allows government to demand more from broadcasting, right or wrongly.

Additionally, free spectrum has always been premised on your industry acting as a public trustee. People feel they have a right to demand higher standards from the industry and have different expectations about what they will see, as compared with the movie theater, a comedy club, HBO, or the Internet.

I bold-faced those four words because they are derived straight out of a conceptualization of broadcasting as a delivery system, primarily for visual goods: stuff you see. Not stuff you hear, or read, as you would with speech — the freedom protected by the First Amendment.

In that same speech, Powell also says this:

Of particular significance, and concern, is that the debate [over media ownership] re-energized the previously fading debate about the role of government in content—whether it be restricting offensive content, or promoting favored content and viewpoints. This increased comfort with content intrusion is part of what is on display in the furious debate about broadcast indecency and excessive violence....

Indeed, I am of the view that competitive pressures much more than consolidation are what account for more programming that tests the limits of indecency and violence...

It is very hard to balance and reconcile our moral and cultural values on one hand, and the enormous value we place on speech free from government intrusion on the other. At the margins this is quite difficult and the FCC has generally been cautious.

Currently, however, we are not talking about speech or conduct on the margin that has set off the current powder keg in the country. We see increasing - - -I might even say escalating - - - complaints from the public because increasingly it seems the media is not playing close to the line, but is outright leaping past the line and in fact daring the audience and daring the government to do anything about it. Some of the transcripts I have been forced to read reveal content that is pure trash, plain and simple, and few, other than staunch libertarians, could possibly stand up and defend it publicly.

"OK, you Libertarians,", Jeff Jarvis says, "open up your Second-Amendment closets, form a militia, and storm Washington; them's fightin' words!"

So, comes the question, fight for what?

Obviously, there's Howard Stern, the morning radio host who began taking extreme collateral damage after the Janet Jackson mess. Howard says the FCC is on a "witch hunt," and that the free speech is the issue:

It is pretty shocking that governmental interference into our rights and free speech takes place in the U.S. It's hard to reconcile this with the "land of the free" and the "home of the brave". I'm sure what's next is the removal of "dirty pictures" like the 20th century German exhibit in a New York City Museum and the erotic literature in our libraries; they too will fall into their category of "evil" as well.

But, as Chairman Powell says, the issue isn't speech. It's "content". To Powell, broadcasting is freight forwarding, and Howard Stern is just container cargo that radio stations "carry" (another transport word). Conceptually, broadcasting has far more in common with trucking than with publishing. which is specifically protected by the First Amendment. That amendment, in its entirety, says this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I bold-faced "assemble" because the First Amendment is especially important to a new environtment where peaceable assembly takes place — one that has been threatened from its beginnings by the kind of thinking that infected broadcasting

Think of this conceptual metaphor — broadcasting is freight forwarding — as a virus: a disease that threatens far more than its own sick self.

Which brings us to the place where you're reading right now: the Net. That's what we need to fight for, and not just because the Net is still a relatively protected place. We need to fight for it because it's not a well-protected place, and because the distinctions will soon vanish between the place we call the Net and the transport system we call broadcasting.

In fact, the two have been getting mooshed together for some time. For evidence, consider our own use of the word "content". When did that start? John Perry Barlow says "I didn't start hearing about 'content' until the container business felt threatened".

Specifically, we began hearing about "content" when two things happened at once. First, the broadcasting and publishing industries saw the Net as the Next Big Thing, and used "content" as an inclusive term for everything the Net could carry. Second, the venture capital business lavishly funded a zillion dot-coms with dreams of building broadcasting and publishing empires on this wonderful new "medium".

As a result

Of course, some of what has been said o". Jeff isn't just another free speech radical. He's perhaps the most important entertainment writer of our time. He was the creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly, V critic for TV Guide and People, Sunday editor and associate publisher of the NY Daily News, and a columnist and editor of other papers as well.

ickly we forget the late Communications Decency Act, which prompted some of the most eloquent outrage ever to smite a piece of bad legislation. It's full name was "Title V--OBSCENITY AND VIOLOENCE Subtitle A--Obscene, Harassing, and Wrongful Utilization of Telecommunications Facilities", and it was part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The rest of that act persists; but the CDA was shot down by the Supreme Court.Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia rundown on the matter:

While the child-related Internet portions are no longer effective, Section 230 of the act added valuable protection for online service providers and users from action against them for the actions of others, stating in part that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." This portion of the Act remains in force and has been strengthened in the copyright area by the OCILLA portion of the DMCA.

The CDA contained a number of provisions criminalizing the display or transmission to a minor of material of a violent or sexual nature. The media affected by this act were the Internet and cable television. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on June 12, 1996 a panel of federal judges blocked part of the CDA, saying it would infringe upon the free speech rights of adults. Next month on July 29, a US federal court struck down the portion of the CDA intended to protect children from indecent speech as too broad. A year later, on June 26, 1997, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court's decision in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, stating that the portion concerned was an unconstitutional abridgement of the First Amendment right to free speech.

The CDA was criticized for prohibiting the posting of "indecent" or "patently offensive" material in public forums on the Internet, which many felt was too ambiguous and could easily be misconstrued. Opponents argued that speech protected under the First Amendment, such as printed novels or the use of the seven dirty words, would suddenly become unlawful when posted to the Internet. Critics also claimed the bill would have a chilling effect on the availability of medical information.

Indecency in (ground wave) TV and radio broadcasting had already been regulated by the Federal Communications Commission - broadcasting of offensive speech was restricted to certain hours of the day, when minor were supposedly least likely to be exposed. Violators (broadcasters) could be fined and potentially lose their licenses.

A narrower version of this act relating to the internet was later restated in the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). COPA was overturned in January 1999 based on case law established when much of the CDA was invalidated.

The Broadcast Decency BDEA was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar in April. Should it pass, don't expect it to get shot down like the CDA. That's because the CDA in 1996 tried to regulate something new that

Forbes has been thinking out loud about the future of radio. As always with Big Business Media, they look mostly for action on the supply side. When your business is doing play-by-play for Vendor Sports, that's the game you like to cover, even when nobody is playing it.

In the last couple of weeks, they've run a series of related features. Radio in 2019, High Definition Listening, Your Radio is Calling, Old Radio is New Again, and Radio's New Definition are all by Ten O'Clock Tech columnist Arik Hesseldahl. Buy my Internet Radio, Please, is by Peter Kafka. Like most tech stories in major business media, brands play the starring roles. Among those mentioned areViacom, Clear Channel, Hahoo, Microsoft, Time Warner, AOL, iBiquity, Disney, Clear Channel, Cox Radio, Citadel Broadcasting, Ford, Texas Instruments, Visteon, NPR, Kenwood USA, Harris, Susquehanna Radio, Mashushita, Tivoli Audio,Brands: XM Satellite Radio, Sirius Satellite Radio, AirAmerica and the branded personas of Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken.

They're pretty good as those kinds of reports go. But the piece that came closest to hitting the real nail on the head was Internet Radio When You Want It, by Arik Hesseldahl, which ran on March 17 of this year. Even that one was about Tivo, Real Networks, Microsoft and Apple. Not KPIG, Radio Paradise, SomaFM, or any of the other Internet radio pioneers. It does mention Audio Hijack by Rogue Amoeba, which lets OS X users bypass the recording feature subtracted from SoundJam after Apple bought the company, created iTunes, and left out the recording feature that used to be there. (Here's a guide to all streming media recording software, including MPlayer, MMS Downloader and VLC media player, all of which work on Linux.)

Last year Arik covered Radio Your Way by PogoProducts.

(the patent-holder for HD Radio, which is the DRM-ful

We've come to the end of broadcasting as we know it.

We tend to think the opposite of broadcasting is narrowcasting. But why let the former define the latter, when the latter is modern and better in a zillion ways that the former cannot comprehend, much less define, even as an opposite?

There are two problems with commercial broadcasting (which, for better or worse, but mostly worse) defines broadcasting in general.

The first problem is a market split: the people who pay for it are not the ones who consume it. Customers (advertisers) and consumers (viewers and listeners) are different populations.

The second problem is one the first problem prevents: relationship. Supply may relate to demand, but not with it.

Enter RSS, which supports supply-demand relationships around notification, subscription, and the larger aspect of both called syndication.

"Syndicate" as a verb yields the noun "syndication" and the adjective "syndicated." Discount the usual noun "sydicated" modifies: "content." Relationships are not about "content." They're about caring and sharing. They're about opening to others who can make and change our minds. "Content" is one of those shipping words that show up in what we'll call Type Three conceptualizations of the Net. Briefly the four types are these:

http://www.windley.com/2004/06/10.html#a1270