it seems that everything nowadays is controlled thru some organized monopoly and there’s not much consumer choice unless you want to go out of your way to do things. for example, you don’t have to use microsoft products but then you risk incompatibility and a steeper learning curve; you don’t have to buy stuff from walmart but then you’ll use up all your money for cool things buying household necessities. there are many more examples which i can’t think of now, but basically you have a choice to switch but it’s not in your best interests to do so. then there are some things which have no alternatives and we just have to accept as monopolies like radio and tv. we don’t really question these monopolies because the barriers of entry are too high (except for your occasional pirate radio) not to mention you need approval by the fcc to operate one.

but that’s the thing, if the fcc decides to give out radio stations every say…0.5 kHz, then the total number of radio stations are restricted to the some sort of oligarchy; people only have the choice of listening to clear channel’s offerings or the local news station or…well that’s it. but why can’t radio stations be closer than 0.5 some-arbitrary-number kHz apart? the people in power would say because the signals would interfere with each other. not true! in fact, signals interfering with each other may be due to bad systems architecture (salon link, better read it before it’s bankrupt). of course that just weakens one of the barriers, the fcc will still need some sort of governing power so pirate radio stations don’t spring up everywhere and use the same frequencies as existing stations. but by clearing up this misconception, the fcc’s control over the frequency spectrum will be weakened such that there can be more choices for the consumer.

another thing that came to mind while i was writing this was how open source lowers the barriers on software development so they can compete against the big corporations like microsoft.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: corporations