SuitWatchFriday, October 20, 2001 —
Here's a story you probably haven't heard. It doesn't have much to do with Linux, until you consider the way Linux, and everything else we like about the Internet Space, is threatened by forces that value intellectual property more than the business commons the Net creates and Linux equips.
It's the story of AM stereo.
Chances are you don't have an AM stereo radio. Chances are you don't even know there is such a thing as AM stereo. After all, everybody knows AM is a lo-fi medium, suitable for news, talk and sports. Not for music.
But AM stereo exists. And there's a real chance your car actually does get AM stereo and you never knew it. My wife's '92 Infiniti Q45a has a factory Bose radio that features AM stereo, and it sounds terrific on the AM stations that feature stereo music -- and pretty good on the stereo news and talk stations. In Los Angeles, just down the coast from where we live, about a third of the AM stations radiate a stereo signal. There are many models of Toyotas, Jeeps, Nissans, Acuras, and various GM cars on the road right now with factory-standard radios that get AM in stereo. But almost nobody, aside from broadcast engineers and a few fanatics with obsessive Web sites have ever heard about AM stereo.
That's why, starting with their 1995 models, Nissan and its Infiniti division quit putting AM stereo in their cars. More accurately, they "de-contented" it. That is, they removed what they thought was a vestigial feature, in an effort to drive down production costs. So, where the 1990-1994 Infiniti Q45 radios featured an AM Stereo button between the bal/fade knob and the Dolby button, there was instead a flat blank space. A broadcast engineer later told me that killing the AM stereo chip saved Nissan about five cents on each radio.
Not that customers missed it. Every Nissan and Infiniti dealer I visited in those days knew nothing about their new cars' AM stereo features. Nothing about it was ever mentioned in any company promotional literature. None of the auto magazines took note of it in their reviews. It's clear the company never informed their sales force about it.
Yet it's still out there, sort of.
What happened, was a big fat standards war, fought entirely among broadcasting's technology producers. The consumers of that technology were so far out of the loop that they might as well have been in another galaxy. So were all the other parties downstream of the combatants at the top of the distribution chain.
The short version of the story is that Motorola, which had the biggest clout with the FCC, prevailed on that agency to name the Motorola C-QUAM system as the AM stereo standard. Broadcast engineers and makers of competing systems, especially one designed by an aggressive entrepreneur named Leonard Kahn, threw a big fit. So the FCC reversed its decision and announced that it would "let the market decide."
But what was "the market?"
On the supply side of the signal, the market consisted of broadcasters. On the demand side, it consisted of consumer electronics and car radio manufacturers, including the automobile makers. The users of receiving technology were never involved in either conversation. Nor were the car dealers and consumer electronics retailers who sold the stuff. They were too far downstream of the action.
Kahn's straightforward and robust technology was favored by broadcast engineers, so lots of stations installed Kahn transmission systems. A larger number, however, installed Motorola C-Quam transmission systems, since Motorola had good relationships with the technology producers involved. Motorola was the only one of the standards combatants that also made chips, so the company was successful in getting its C-Quam decoder chips installed in some car makers' radios. As for other kinds of receivers -- portable radios, stereos, Walkmen, etc. -- very few AM stereo models ever reached market, and all of them have since disappeared.
The big problem was on the demand side. Consumer electronics producers weren't buying any kind of AM stereo as long as there wasn't a single standard. So, basically, nothing happened.
Eventually the FCC decided to ratify the Motorola "market" victory, and that's the system we hear today, if we bother to care.
The lesson here is about what happens when all the action -- that "competitive environment" economists call markets -- is tied up in production and distribution, and decided entirely by "players" at the production end of the value chain. Down here at the bottom of the industrial conveyor belts, we're flat-out clueless about what's going on, and powerless to change much if any of it. All we can do is buy or not buy the crap that comes out the pipe.
Real markets -- bazaars where buyers and sellers get to talk and develop relationships and where power is evenly distributed between supply and demand -- are natural to the Net and anathema not just to broadcasting, but to the larger content production and distribution system that Entertainment has been all about since it became a major industry toward the middle of the last century.
This is what the SSSCA, the DMCA, UCITA and all the other laws pushed by Disney and the RIAA are all about. They conceive the Internet not as a place for business, but as an out-of-control distribution system where intellectual property theft is way too easy. They conceive customers as hostile, the Net as a loaded weapon and these new laws as a kind of gun control.
We can't fight them on their terms, which are all about distribution -- "content" that is "loaded" into "channels" and "addressed" for "delivery" to "end users" and "consumers." We have to fight them here in the bazaar, where freedom, inalienable rights, openness and conversation and real competition among creative businesses are the natural way of things.
Is there a real risk that the Net we know and love -- and Linux along with it -- will become as marginal and irrelevant as AM stereo? I used to think it couldn't happen. Now I'm not so sure. Making these laws has proven way too easy for the Entertainment cartels. There is a drift, even on the part of Linux' friends like IBM, toward ownership of basic Web technology by patent and intellectual property holders. That's what the RAND proposal in front of the W3C is all about. In top-level corporate offices, there is a move toward strengthening intellectual property positions and attitudes.
We need to fight that. If the Net becomes regulated distribution plumbing for "content," it will cease to be a market. And Linux will just be handy building material for stuff that doesn't get in the way.