December 2006 – DIYmedia

FCC Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps were in Seattle on November 30th to take more public testimony on the agency’s ongoing media ownership rules review. Reclaim the Media, packed the main auditorium of the Seattle Public Library and provided the Commissioners with four hours’ worth of testimony.
Just two weeks before the FCC’s visit, RtM also organized the Northwest Community Radio Summit, which featured three days of workshops on a wide range of issues. One of those was on “The Case for Free Radio in the 21st Century” (1:00:34, 10.4 MB), hosted by members of the Free Radio Olympia collective. It provided a short overview of the history of unlicensed broadcasting and some of the more popular rationales for why it’s still advantageous to be a radio pirate in a post-LPFM world. Continue reading “Microradio, Today and Tomorrow”

Some interesting tidbits have been published recently that provide a nice point-counterpoint to the way countries are handling the use of spectrum in a digital world.
The U.S. Department of Commerce (the Federal Communications Commission’s parent department) has just established a two-year “Spectrum Advisory Committee” to offer “reforms that expedite the American public’s access to broadband services, public safety services, and long-range spectrum planning.” It would seem that this committee is to further the work of the White House’s Spectrum Policy Initiative, created three and a half years ago, which to-date hasn’t seemed to produce anything of substance.
As in the case of the first initiative, this committee will not report to the FCC, but instead to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which primarily oversees spectrum activities restricted to government use and international spectrum issues. Continue reading “U.S., U.K. Chart Spectrum's Future”