Should the FCC Be a Tool of Protectionist Policy?

  

If you're a manufacturer or other innovator looking to find new and profitable uses for the latest humanoid and quadruped robots, or a developer of solar-power farms, last week's action by the U. S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ban foreign imports of new models of both categories of goods has hit you where it hurts. 

 

At first glance, seeing the FCC ban certain types of hardware that nominally have nothing to do with communications sounds odd, like watching the Federal Reserve trying to stop Madonna concerts.  But FCC chair Brendan Carr knows where the levers of power are in his agency, and he's manipulated them in a way that is technically legitimate, though questionable on a larger scale.  Virtually all electronics sold in the U. S. needs an FCC seal of approval, and without such approval, it can't be sold. 

 

Solar-power farms use a technology called power inverters—circuits and systems that take the varying amount of raw DC power produced by solar panels and convert it into a form of AC that will smoothly mesh with the standard AC power grid.  Many of these devices have features that allow communications with them over the internet.  The nominal concern is that there might be rogue software in the inverters that could be used by an offshore miscreant to cause massive power blackouts remotely, for instance.  (Some types of inverters don't connect to the internet, and they are not covered by the ban.)

 

No such software has ever been found, but that doesn't mean it's not there.  Anyway, the subtext hidden under the nominal reason for the ban is that Chinese manufacturers dominate both the humanoid-robot and solar power-inverter markets.  Banning newly-designed products of these types from China will cut off the U. S. market for these goods.  Evidently the hope is that such trade restrictions will move China in a direction more favorable to U. S. trade goals, whatever they are. 

 

But increasingly, trade and tariff restrictions are beginning to look like efforts to cut off one's nose in order to spite one's face.  By the time the tiny U. S. manufacturing base for power inverters grows to fill some of the huge demand, many solar projects will be slowed or halted.  Politically, that would be just fine with the present administration, which has already displayed an animus against renewable energy in other ways. 

 

The wider question ethically is whether protectionism in high-tech goods is a good thing for the U. S. or not.  While there are things to be said on both sides of the issue, a recent article by Daniel Foster in National Review throws a historical light on the situation.  Briefly, the rise of protectionism may be only one symptom in a geopolitical crisis that is just now getting under way.

 

Foster looks to history to find a relationship between the well-being of international trade and power balance among nations.  During periods such as the late Victorian era or the Cold War, when a single nation exerts hegemonic power over the globe (Britain or the U. S., respectively), conditions are favorable for free trade enforced, explicitly or implicitly, by the "hegemon" in charge.  This idea is borne out by the great expansion of manufacturing and consumer-goods availability during the latter part of the Industrial Revolution from 1850 to 1916, and during the post-World-War II era from 1950 up to about 2000. 

 

But when the dominance of a single power declines and some nations begin to feel that their time in the sun is running out, each nation feels like it has to look out for itself first, because the formerly dominant power has forsaken it.  With the whiplash-inducing foreign policy that the U. S. has followed under President Trump, one can scarcely blame any other nation for feeling that way now. 

 

And as the night follows the day, Foster claims that a prominent feature of "multipolarity"—the lack of any single dominant nation—is going to be a rise in protectionism around the world.  And that's pretty much what we're seeing now.

 

Things haven't deterioriated to the extent that U. S. products can't find markets abroad at all, but in the confusing tit-for-tat world of tariffs, farmers and other producers of U. S. goods have suffered losses already, with more likely to come.  The argument going back to Adam Smith that free trade is better for all parties, other things being equal, is still valid.  If I can make needles and need thread, and you can make thread and need needles, it's silly for each of us to try to do both jobs, one of them badly, when trading between experts can result in mutual benefit.

 

But if the geopolitical winds are blowing against free trade, then the specific actions of the FCC against two specific products appears to be only one more straw blowing in that wind.  One can quibble about the way it was done.  Arguably it is a misuse of the agency's authority to withhold approvals of new designs, not because they would realistically cause communications problems, but for some other reason. 

 

This is not the first time the FCC has banned categories of technology for reasons that are just as political as technical.  The giant Chinese telecomm manufacturer Huwei has been subject to import bans for many years, out of a concern that Chinese monitors could use its phone systems to spy on the U. S. 

 

But that is not as much a stretch as it is to think that Chinese controllers would jump in one day and disable all the production lines using their robots, or all the solar farms using their inverters.  We are living in an interconnected world, for good or ill, and if we start getting too paranoid and pull up the drawbridges that connect us to other countries, where do you stop? 

 

Foster closes his article with the prediction that a world of protectionism and unstable touchy governments likely to take proactive military action will be a world that is poorer and more dangerous than it has to be.  And he's probably right about that.  While we can make some progress trying to restart U. S. manufacturing in neglected areas, it may not make up for what we've lost.  And that may take some getting used to.

 

Sources:  The Associated Press article by Chan Ho-Him "US bans foreign-made humanoid robots, targeting China over national security," appeared in numerous news outlets and can be found in its original form at https://apnews.com/article/china-us-humanoid-robots-ban-tech-c9f5e3c94d91d00eff3b61b141fab366.  Daniel Foster's article "Something Is Going to Happen" appeared on pp. 29-33 of the September 2026 issue of National Review.  I also referred to an article in PV Magazine at https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/07/28/fcc-bans-foreign-produced-solar-inverters-grid-lockout-begins-today/ and the Wikipedia article on Brendan Carr.

Can 5G Really Knock Planes Out Of the Sky?

 

Let's hope we never find out.

 

Last week, a number of U. S. air carriers filed an emergency request with the FCC to delay the turn-on of 5G mobile-phone towers near major airports.  AT&T and Verizon were planning to turn on the towers as part of their 5G rollout, which uses a part of the electromagnetic spectrum called C-band to improve transmission rates while maintaining good geographic coverage. 

 

The reason the airlines were worried is that for decades, devices called radar altimeters have provided pilots with absolute altitude readings as they land.  Altimeters are used below about 2500 feet (800 meters) altitude in both fair and inclement weather as a landing aid.  In recent years, they have been incorporated into autopilot and terrain-awareness warning systems, and a malfunction of the radar altimeter could cause false warnings or more serious problems such as a crash. 

 

The altimeters currently in use employ the 4.2-4.4 GHz range of frequencies with a technology called FMCW, standing for Frequency Modulation Continuous Wave.  As the transmitter's frequency slides up and down linearly, the time it takes the signal to go from the plane, bounce back, and return to the altimeter is translated into a low-frequency tone which is proportional to the plane's absolute height.  It's a simple, reliable system, which is why it is used for many safety-related purposes on modern aircraft.

 

Last year, AT&T and Verizon paid $80 billion for rights to a chunk of spectrum just below the radar altimeter band, from 3.7 to 3.98 GHz.  Their new 5G systems use this band instead of an older lower-frequency band for improved data rates and nearly the same geographic coverage ability.  Other parts of the world have made this switch already, but with certain restrictions around airports for the same reason that has upset U. S. airlines:  the potential that mobile-phone tower transmissions will cause problems to radar altimeters.

 

Although the two frequency bands are separated by what is known as a "guard band" (a kind of frequency no-man's-land intended to provide adequate separation between allocations), whether a given altimeter will be messed up by a given mobile-phone tower is not that easy to figure out. 

 

Radio devices of all kinds discriminate against interference with a combination of digital filtering (in software, essentially) and analog filtering, which consists of pieces of hardware called band-pass filters.  Unfortunately for the software people, a strong enough interfering signal outside of a device's intended band can overwhelm the "front end" (the part that turns an analog radio signal into a form usable by digital systems) and disable it.  To prevent this, the system needs to have better analog filtering, which consists of mainly passive frequency-selective circuits that cost money and space.

 

Before 5G came along, I'm sure the radar-altimeter people put just enough filtering into their systems to prevent the worst existing adjacent-channel offenders from messing up their radars.  That might have been good enough a few years ago, but now that the phone companies are putting transmitters in the 3.7 to 3.98-GHz band, it may or may not be good enough.

 

These kinds of issues are typically straightened out with the assistance of field tests, but it appears that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has not surveyed radar altimeters with a view toward their interference-rejecting ability until the last few weeks, according to one report. 

 

As things stand, AT&T and Verizon have agreed to delay for another six months, but not cancel, their plans to roll out 5G near airports.  It looks like a big game of chicken has been going on between the wireless carriers and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on one side, and the airlines and the FAA on the other side, with each side pulling rank and blaming the other for causing the problem.  The only thing that seems to have stopped the rollout this time was intervention by the White House, which extracted a promise from the phone companies that the rollout will be delayed another six months.  But AT&T and Verizon say that's the last delay they're going to put up with, as we're falling further behind other countries already with our 5G rollout. 

 

It's a sad thing when you see not only businesses, but federal agencies, duking it out in public and making grandstanding plays to force resolution over what should be a strictly technical issue.  But that's an engineering-nerd point of view, the viewpoint that ignores money and politics and sees only the technical aspects of the problem. 

 

Compared to places like France, the FCC allocation allows higher power and closer frequency spacing to the altimeter band, and so the airlines may have a valid concern that turning on the 5G towers could mess up some altimeters.  Because the altimeters are so critical to aircraft safety systems, that is a problem that you want to stay away from by a wide margin. 

 

Evidently, more recently designed altimeters use improved band-pass filters that are more likely to reject 5G interference, but the airlines were unwilling to retrofit their planes with all-new altimeters.  And the FAA seems to be complicit in this, dragging its feet about even doing tests or inspections until recently.

 

The airlines and the 5G system operators now have six more months in which to work out a solution that is both technically sound, keeping us far away from having radar altimeters jammed by Aunt Suzy's phone call (or movie, more likely), and financially agreeable.  AT&T and Verizon are the big spenders in this picture, laying out billions for the spectrum and more billions for their upgraded systems, which they now want to start profiting from, understandably.  On the other hand, the airlines have not been having a good couple of years lately, in case you hadn't noticed, and I suppose they thought they could avoid yet another expense by jawboning and threats to shut down the entire air-transport system.  It worked once, but it's unlikely to work again.

 

I'm glad to be writing about a bureaucratic tempest in a teapot rather than about a clear-air crash that is discovered to be caused by a 5G tower interfering with a radar altimeter.  But this whole thing could have been handled better, and now the parties involved have six months to do it right.

 

Sources:  I referred to an article carried by the Austin American-Statesman on Jan. 19 from AP by David Koenig entitled "AT&T, Verizon to delay new 5G" and a piece by Jake Hertz on the allaboutcircuits.com site at https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-did-the-5g-c-band-threaten-to-ground-thousands-of-flights/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on radar altimeters. 

Carr's Fix for Social Media: The Digital Communication Act

 

Nicholas Carr is a writer whose book The Shallows:  What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, published in 2010, gained considerable attention by pointing out how new technologies have affected our basic thought processes, and not always in a good way.  In the fall 2021 issue of The New Atlantis journal, he proposes a legislative initiative he calls the Digital Communications Act that would, if adopted, go far toward alleviating some of the worst harms that social media currently cause.  But to understand the thrust of his proposals, a little historical background is in order.

 

Electronic media basically do two different kinds of things:  personal communication and broadcasting.  Until the Internet came along, these two different activities were done by more or less completely different kinds of technology.  The telegraph and telephone are classic examples of the first kind:  personal communication, one person to another.  As regulations evolved in the twentieth century to deal with issues of privacy arising from the fact that telegraph and telephone operators could eavesdrop on personal communications through their systems, legislatures and courts came up with what is called a "common-carrier" doctrine. 

 

Borrowed from the transportation field, the concept of a common carrier is that some industries do things that are so vital to the public good that they need to be regulated in order to enforce goods such as fairness and privacy.  The first quasi-independent federal agency of any magnitude, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was established to enforce common-carrier rules on railroads, which had previously engaged in discriminatory and predatory pricing to exploit farmers who had no other way to sell their crops in wider markets than local ones. 

 

When Western Union and the Bell System came along, the federal government applied common-carrier rules to them.  The tariffs, as they were called, could get quite complicated, but the overarching principle was simple:  treat all communications as private and treat all (or most) customers the same. 

 

Broadcasting, on the other hand, had to be treated differently once people figured out that one person in a studio could potentially talk to millions of others nationwide.  The Federal Radio Commission of 1927, predecessor to the current Federal Communications Commission (FCC), came up with a phrase that described how broadcasters must treat the privilege, granted by an FCC license, of addressing thousands or millions at once:  "the public interest, convenience, or necessity," sometimes abbreviated PICON.  Over the decades, PICON has dictated how broadcasters must behave in order to retain their broadcasting privileges.  As the nature of the public changes continually, PICON standards change as well.  From the 1940s through the 1980s, the FCC imposed what was called the "fairness doctrine," which required broadcasters to give equal time to opposing sides in a political contest, for example.  After the FCC abandoned the doctrine in 1987, religious and partisan political broadcasting flourished, but the net benefit to the public is debatable, to say the least.

 

When the Internet came along, it put all these nice separate types of communication in a super-speed blender and mixed them all together.  From the same computer, I can email one friend, or if I'm a super-influencer, I can send the same image of my latest clothing style to ten million people.  But the two categories—personal communication and broadcasting—still apply, and it's not that hard to separate them by either intent or by statistical means.  As Carr puts it, "An Instagrammer [or an engineering ethics blogger] with a hundred followers can be assumed to be engaged in conversation;  an Instagrammer with a hundred thousand followers is a broadcaster."  Carr says—and I agree with him—that the psychological or humanistic categories of personal communication and broadcasting are still useful, and should be used to discriminate between two types of regulation that his proposed Digital Communications Act would apply to social media and internet service providers.

 

For personal communications, ranging from emails, to Facebook posts to a few friends, to search-engine inquiries, the Act would require companies to respect one's privacy.  No more searching for snow shovels online and getting buried in emails and pop-ups for snow shovels, dirt shovels, and snow cones.  No more talking about driving to a fast-food outlet and having your phone overhear your conversation and throw ads at you for that chain, or a rival one.  We've almost gotten used to it, but I know people who have gotten used to living with cancer.  That doesn't mean it's a good thing to have cancer.

 

For broadcasting, which means anything anybody does that reaches more than a certain threshold number of people, something like the old PICON doctrine needs to be imposed.  Carr is perhaps intentionally vague on what a 2021-era version of the fairness doctrine would look like.  Much of the really harmful stuff that runs around the Internet is spontaneous, as "going viral" is not something one particular person can infallibly bring about.  But the process itself is easily monitored and encouraged by the social media companies, as things like that are their bread and butter.  And it wouldn't be hard to set up rules or software to regulate the process—technically, I mean.

 

Politically, it's another can of worms altogether.  In what could qualify as the understatement of the year, Carr says his proposed Act "would be complicated and controversial.  It would be resisted by many powerful private interests."  Yes, only Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, well, you know the list.  It would be opposed mainly because it would cut off one of their main revenue streams, which is advertising targeted by means of snooping into your private communications, and that would be barred under the Act.  A snowball has an excellent chance inside Mt. Vesuvius compared to this bill, at least under present circumstances. 

 

But times and circumstances change, and maybe some day an outrage may occur that is so universally deplored that the political will of the country will favor such a move.  As Carr points out, it was the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 that catalyzed international regulation of the radio waves, because interfering stations made it hard to conduct rescue operations by radio.  We have had numerous political disasters that social media have played a part in, but nobody has been killed yet, at least not directly. 

 

Anyway, I think Carr has done us all a great service in basing his argument for a Digital Communications Act on a sound historical footing, and now all we need to do is enact it.  Stay tuned, so to speak.

 

Sources:  Nicholas Carr's article "How to Fix Social Media" appeared on pp. 3-20 of the Fall 2021 issue of The New Atlantis.  I also referred to a Wikipedia article on the fairness doctrine. 

The Grand 5G TV Frequency Reshuffle

From now until July, TV broadcasters in the U. S. are in the final phases of a grand reshuffle of broadcast frequencies that has been going on for several years.  Unless you happen to watch TV the old-fashioned way—by getting a signal from a rooftop or indoor VHF/UHF antenna directly from the terrestrial broadcast transmitter—you probably haven't even noticed.  But this is the tail end of a process that began back in 2012, when the U. S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) auctioned off a slather of frequencies in the 600-700 MHz range to be used as a part of the new 5G mobile-phone plan.

You may not think of the radio spectrum this way (if at all), but it is a limited natural resource, like fresh water or land.  As humanity has learned how to exploit it in increasingly effective ways, the value of various parts of it has fluctuated, mostly upward, but not always.  For the first seventy years or so of the FCC's existence, the agency treated the spectrum like the federal government treated federal land:  if you qualified, you could just get some of it for free, and then it was yours to use or sell just like any other private property. 

This wasn't always the best or the fairest way to do things.  Back in the 1920s, when it wasn't clear that radio would amount to much more than some hobbyists annoying their neighbors with loud spark-gap transmitters, it seemed like a reasonable approach.  But by the 1950s, when radio and then television frequencies were valued on the private market in the millions of dollars, politicians began to pull strings and the whole thing got very complicated.  For example, how much of a coincidence was it that the application for a new TV station that then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to build in Austin in the early 1950s was the only application filed in that city?  None at all, because everybody else knew that LBJ was so connected in Washington that filing a competing application would be a waste of time.  So LBJ's family became the proud owners of  the first TV station in Austin in 1952, and the next TV station there didn't open until 1965.

Eventually, laws were passed so that the FCC could actually hold auctions to allocate new spectrum frequencies.  This change acknowledged that the radio spectrum had value, and probably a better way to allocate it than political influence was to sell it to the highest bidder. 

And of course, technology wasn't standing still during this time, either.  When the first UHF TV band was opened in 1952, it was viewed as the most wasted part of the "vast wasteland" of TV, in the words of a cynical FCC commissioner.  Originally it covered the entire frequency range from 470 MHz to 890 MHz, with channel numbers designated 14 through 83. Because a TV channel then occupied about 6 MHz, in principle there was room for almost 70 channels in the UHF band.  But for many years, that promise went largely unfulfilled for technical reasons.

It was a considerable challenge to early consumer-TV makers to build a UHF tuner, which is the "front-end" part of the TV that takes the signal from the antenna and converts it down to a reasonably low frequency to be demodulated and used.  Those old UHF tuners were fussy, handmade devices that you tuned with a continuously-rotating knob, like a radio dial.  And they were very subject to interference from other UHF stations.  Because of these problems, the FCC handed out a whole lot fewer UHF frequencies than it looked like at first glance you could fit in that huge range, because if the spectrum got anywhere close to crowded, all the UHF tuners would start picking up the wrong signals and everything would go to pot.  Also, UHF signals didn't carry as far as the lower VHF frequencies (channels 2-13), so a lot of early UHF stations were local low-budget affairs that couldn't afford anything better.

Technical times changed, as they always do, and around 2000 the TV industry made its move to digital broadcasting.  This change, plus advances in tuner design, rendered the old super-cautious FCC allocations pointless.  And with the advent of cable TV, the importance of over-the-air broadcasting began to wane, and once tuning your TV became a job for a computer, the channel numbers no longer had to be irrevocably fixed to particular frequencies, as they had to be with electromechanical tuners. 

Fast-forward to 2012.  The new 5G mobile phone service plan includes the use of a 600-700 MHz band that will allow base-quality service over a much wider area than the current higher-frequency mobile phone cells permit.  The problem was, there were still a lot of TV stations in that frequency range, hanging on to their old UHF TV allocations.  The FCC made them a deal:  if you let us auction off your frequency for 5G, we'll either share some of the profits with you and you can take the money and go off the air, or move to another frequency.  Either way, we've got to clear this band for 5G.  Kind of a spectrum-allocation eminent-domain action, as it were.  Some stations took the money and quit.  Others have been shifting up and down the frequency spectrum in a ten-phase process that will be completed by July of 2020.  While this can be a big deal for the broadcasters, involving costly new transmitters and transmitting antennas, the most that even off-the-air consumers will notice is that a station may go blank, but all you have to do is "rescan" your digital TV, and it will automatically hunt for the new frequency and find it for you.

To a geezer like me, who grew up having to get up off the chair and twiddle with the fine-tune control on the TV tuner every so often, it all seems too easy.  And there's something odd about the fluid shifting going on behind the scenes.  Back when a channel allocation was something to be proud of, stations often incorporated their channel number in their logo.  For example, in Fort Worth, the local independent station was Channel 11, and their logo featured the two numeral 1's as two nattily-dressed guys in little white suits, complete with handkerchiefs in their breast pockets (I may be imagining the handkerchief part, but you get the idea). 

No longer.  It's all as invisible as sewer pipes now, and about as interesting to the average consumer.  But in case you were wondering where your off-the-air station went, this may be part of the explanation.

Sources:  Not being a watcher of TV any longer myself, I learned about this process from an article in the San Jose Mercury-News at https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/30/heres-why-you-might-need-to-rescan-your-tv-right-now/.  I also referred to articles from Gizmodo at https://gizmodo.com/5g-is-forcing-hundreds-of-tv-channels-to-change-how-the-1837111135 and Venturebeat at https://venturebeat.com/2019/12/10/the-definitive-guide-to-5g-low-mid-and-high-band-speeds/

and the Wikipedia article on UHF TV broadcasting.  The FCC has a handy map on which you can look up your local TV stations and see what's going on with their channel moves, if any, at https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps.  And I got the short version of the KLBJ story from Slate, which summarizes LBJ biographer Robert Caro's extensive research on the matter at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/07/how-lady-bird-and-lyndon-baines-johnson-came-by-their-millions.html. 

The FCC and 5G

When I attended Cornell University in 1976 and 1977 for my master's degree, I took a microwave lab course.  In the lab room where we worked was a large glass desiccator jar, sort of like a clear cookie jar with blue desiccator crystals in the bottom to keep the contents dry.  Inside the main area of the jar were tiny rectangular copper pipes with little connectors on the ends. The pipes were about a quarter of an inch wide or less, some as small as soda straws, and a few inches long.  When I asked one of the professors what this was, he explained that the pipes were millimeter-wave waveguides.  Certain frequencies of millimeter waves were highly absorbed by water, so they had decided to keep the waveguides in a desiccator jar to make sure that they didn't have any absorbed film of water in them that would mess up the measurements they might make with them. 

Back then, millimeter-wave equipment was nothing more than a laboratory curiosity.  In terms of frequencies, millimeter waves range from 30 GHz up to 300 GHz.  Their name comes from the fact that they make waves in air that are between 1 and 10 millimeters long from one peak to the next peak.  Back in the 1970s, they were extremely hard to generate and detect, and nobody but a few scientists had anything to do with them.  The only large corporation that had pursued serious research about millimeter waves was Bell Laboratories, which thought for a while that the future of their network would involve millimeter-wave waveguides crisscrossing the country.  But when Corning and other companies figured out how to make extremely low-loss optical fibers, Bell dropped their millimeter-wave idea and switched to fiber optics, which is how the vast majority of network traffic travels today.

But you can't attach fiber optics to a moving car, or somebody walking down the street, so as newer applications such as virtual reality and the Internet of Things grow, there is a constantly increasing need for more wireless bandwidth.  And millimeter waves will be a key player in the next generation of wireless network technology called 5G.

Last Friday, Apr. 12, the U. S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that it plans to auction off close to 5 GHz of some millimeter-wave bands that have previously been reserved for other purposes.  These bands are at 37, 39, and 47 GHz.  For many years now, auctions have been the FCC's preferred method of allocating frequencies to private entities, and while such auctions shut out everyone except those well-heeled enough to afford to exploit the frequencies they buy, this process is a lot more transparent and fair than their former practice of simply opening applications to all comers, and waiting to see who gets there first.  And the old process was often subject to political log-rolling.  For example, the way Lyndon B. Johnson obtained control of station KLBJ in Austin and vastly mproved its value in the 1940s does not bear a lot of scrutiny, unless you don't mind finding a lot of political wangling that the then-senator engaged in with the FCC. 

While auctions of radio spectrum allocations are not inherently just proceedings in themselves, they do acknowledge that the spectrum is a limited natural esource, and an auction allows interested parties to express their perceived value of that resource in bids.  We don't often value what we don't pay for, and so an auction tends to ensure that whoever gets the right to use certain frequencies is going to exploit them so as to get their money's worth. 

Even as recently as a decade ago, an auction of millimeter-wave bands wouldn't have attracted much attention, because the technology to generate and receive such waves was way too expensive for consumer products.  But with advances in fabrication methods, microwave technology, and adaptive control of antennas, it's now feasible to start building the micro-cells that millimeter-wave wireless will need.  As you go higher in frequency to around 60 GHz, millimeter waves are increasingly absorbed by oxygen in the air, and even below that frequency they do not propagate very far compared to the longer microwaves that are used for earlier wireless systems.  So this means we will need a whole lot more millimeter-wave base stations than you would need for equivalent coverage at lower frequencies. 

A millimeter-wave base station won't be a two-hundred-foot tower with antennas several feet long hanging from the top.  It will probably take the form of a box or panel just a few feet square, sitting at or near ground level, typically on a utility pole.  They will show up first in big cities where the density of foot and vehicle traffic justifies the installations, and then less dense areas will be covered.  For sparsely populated areas, the FCC has announced it is thinking about allocating some frequencies as low as 600 MHz, whose waves can cover much wider areas, so suburbs and rural regions won't be totally left out in the cold, wireless-wise.

This all assumes that there's nothing harmful to human health regarding the increased amount of millimeter-wave radiation that people will be subjected to as 5G deploys.  There is at least one person with apparently good qualifications who says this isn't so.  Martin L. Pall is a retired professor of biological sciences at Washington State University who has published both refereed journal papers and popular talks saying that Wi-Fi, and in particular millimeter waves, can cause everything from low sperm counts to cancer.  I know enough about electromagnetics to have reason to doubt some of his reasoning as to how this occurs, but interested parties can examine his case here.  If he's right, we ought to go slow on the rollout of 5G, but it looks like instead we'll be performing a massive experiment in which millions of people get exposed—and then we'll see if anything bad happens. 

Sources:  The FCC's news release about their planned 5G auction can be found at

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-356984A1.pdf.  I read about the plan in an Associated Press article carried by the Austin American-Statesman on Apr. 13, a version of which can be viewed at the AP website https://www.apnews.com/402d7c2651914d31a4f216f81eadda53.  Dr. M. L. Pall's expression of his concerns regarding the increasing use of Wi-Fi can be read in his paper in Environmental Research vol. 164, pp. 405-416 (July 2018), which is downloadable at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935118300355.

Will We Miss Net Neutrality?

On Thursday, Dec. 14, the U. S. Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 in favor of repealing the Obama-era "net neutrality" rules that have been in effect since 2015.  Like so many things lately, net neutrality has become a partisan issue, and the vote went along party lines, the three Republican appointees on the Commission voting in favor of repeal and the two Democrats opposing it.  Polls show that the idea of net neutrality is popular, with as many as 80% of those asked being in favor of it.  But the pollsters generally didn't ask respondents to define net neutrality, or to say why they favored it.  Amid the protests and shrill voices raised on both sides of the issue, it's hard to get a grasp on what exactly is at stake, and what the pros and cons are.  A little history may help in this regard.

Among other things, most modern governments are expected to protect the weak against the strong.  This is an elementary aspect of justice.  In the late 1800s, during the rapid expansion of another kind of network—the railroad network—the public became aroused over perceived abuses that the railroads were practicing.  Farmers discovered that the railroads were manipulating shipping charges to curry favor with certain interest groups, and handing out free passenger passes to influential politicians.  The problems were so pervasive that the first free-standing administrative commission in the executive branch of the federal government was established to ride herd on the railroads:  the Interstate Commerce Commission, or ICC.

The ICC established rules for what became known as "common carriers"—enterprises that were so essential to the public that regulation by government was regarded as necessary.  The idea of a common carrier spread to other systems such as bus lines, airlines, and public utilities like electric and water systems.  In exchange for close regulation by the government, the business being regulated was allowed to make a reasonable profit.  Some industries eventually came around to welcoming common-carrier status, because they found that manipulating the government's rules in their favor wasn't that hard and it stabilized their business models. 

In 2003, a Columbia University professor named Tim Wu coined the phrase "net neutrality" to extend the common-carrier idea to the internet, which was not regulated in any meaningful way at the time.  In the case of the internet, the potential for the kind of abuse that the railroads got into trouble for is always there.  And there have been some incidents prior to the 2015 adoption of formal net-neutrality rules that give advocates of net neutrality some credibility.  According to the Wikipedia article on net neutrality, the internet service provider (ISP) Comcast took measures to throw digital roadblocks in the way of the troublesome service BitTorrent, which was using up a lot of bandwidth at the time, and the FCC has fined AT&T for similar misbehavior.

But the net neutrality rules that the FCC has now pledged to abandon may go too far in the other direction.  According to ISPs, the rules left them with limited flexibility for expansion and the offering of new services.  Treating everybody the same on the internet is a fine idea in principle, but working out the details can get complicated, and there are genuine judgment calls involved in an ISP's decisions of how to allocate limited fiber-optic and especially wireless bandwidth to best serve the incredible variety of customers, and websites that customers want to visit. 

We have seen how the content providers themselves (e. g. Facebook) have done things that go against some principles of net neutrality, such as the idea of no censorship.  Both for legal and moral reasons, Facebook polices itself and removes posts it deems to be unsuitable for various reasons.  But it's not an ISP that's doing this, it's Facebook. 

The ISPs, as ISPs, do not have the resources (or I suspect, the inclination) to do a lot of fine-grain discrimination, which is probably the kind of thing that many people who favor net neutrality are worried about.  Basically, the ISPs don't have time to pick through the floods of data that they must ship around every microsecond.  The most they can do in a typical situation is to note sites and services that produce unusually demanding traffic patterns.  And I think the most that they are hoping for in the repeal of net neutrality is to gain some freedom more efficiently to allocate their bandwidth in order to serve the most customers with the fewest additional resources of hardware and software. 

Maybe that is a Pollyanna-ish and naive view of ISPs, but it's hard for me to imagine that some of the more dire consequences foretold by the proponents of net neutrality will result from its abandonment:  widespread censorship, the inability of small-scale websites and enterprises to compete with larger ones based on something the ISP is doing, and so on.  One concern, transparency, is largely being taken care of by the internet itself.  Tricks like artificially degrading services are quickly detected and exposed by users, and it's easy for protesters to gather a digital lynch mob with torches and clubs and go after the bad guys.  Whether the bad guys mend their ways is another question, but my point is that if an ISP tries anything unpopular, they will be called out for it.  And this is an important self-regulating aspect of the internet that we may not appreciate as much as we should.

So my own answer is, no, I don't think we'll miss what we've had for only the last two years anyway, in terms of the Obama-era net neutrality regulations.  Even critics of the FCC decision admit that nothing is going to change right away, as the Commission has to come up with alternative rules and perhaps turn over some aspects of its work with the internet to the Federal Trade Commission. 

The internet is a modern necessity, not much less essential than electric power, and it is appropriate for governments to make sure that whoever qualifies as "weak" with regard to it is protected against unfair and unjust depredations by ISPs, or anybody else for that matter.  But even in the bad old days before government regulations were in place, abuses were fairly rare.  And it looks like the commercial instinct of self-preservation will keep ISPs from doing anything really dastardly, now that net neutrality rules are going away. 

Sources:  I referred to reports on the FCC vote to repeal net neutrality carried by AOL.com at https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/12/14/fcc-commissioner-closes-statement-on-net-neutrality-vote-with-a-warning/23307786/ and https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/12/14/federal-communications-commission-votes-to-repeal-net-neutrality-rules/23307670/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on net neutrality and the Interstate Commerce Commission.

What Really Happened With Internet Privacy?

Anyone paying attention to U. S. headlines recently heard something about internet privacy.  But what you heard probably depends on where you heard it.  President Trump signed a bill on Monday, Apr. 3 that used a thing called the Congressional Review Act to reverse a pending FCC rule.  So whatever it was, the rule that was revoked hadn't even gone into effect yet.

If it hadn't been shot down, the FCC's proposed rule would have required internet service providers (ISPs) such as AT&T to request permission from their customers to use certain data about what the customers do online.  Right now, ISPs don't have to ask, but depending on the ISP, they may not be doing much with that data anyway.  The big users of customer-generated data are social-media outlets such as Facebook, Internet companies such as Google, and advertisers who pay these outfits to place targeted ads using harvested customer data.  I'm sure the ISPs would like to get into that business eventually, but the FCC rule would have blocked them.  President Trump and the Republican-dominated Congress simply removed that stumbling block.

So for one thing, nobody lost any internet privacy they previously had.  As to the hypothetical future, it's anybody's guess what the FCC rule might have done, but clearly the ISPs were not happy about it, which was how the rule got quashed by a corporate-friendly Congress and President.

How you feel about this may depend on what you think about internet privacy and corporate freedom.  At this point in history, the phrase "Internet privacy" is about as meaningful as "Trump modesty."  Both are in short supply.  Most people who spend any time at all on the web have turned from looking for electric toothbrushes online, say, to researching the versions of ancient Mayan calendars, only to have an ad for toothbrushes pop up in the middle of the British Museum's webpage.  Obviously, a combination of "cookies" (little browser things that tell servers where your web browser has been) and clever marketing schemes has engineered that outcome.  All the FCC rule might have done would have been to stop ISPs such as AT&T and Verizon from doing similar things, at least without asking first.   And the asking could have been buried in one of those novel-length terms-and-conditions documents that everybody must either lie about reading before signing onto a new service, or actually read (and I don't know anybody who reads them).  The only reason that the FCC could have passed the rule in the first place lies in the historical carve-outs of which Federal agency gets to regulate what electronic communications means.  A similar historical fluke explains why on-the-air TV shows are not quite as raunchy as cable shows:  the FCC gets to regulate on-air stuff, but not cable-only stuff.

So what has been portrayed in some circles as an epic loss of consumer protection turns out to be more of a turf battle among giant powerful Federal agencies and giant corporations, and the consumer just gets to watch the results from the sidelines. 

Even though the actual effect of either the FCC ruling or its revocation by Congress and the President might have been minimal, it's worth asking a broader question about how consumers—or citizens, to use a more general term—are faring with respect to the centers of power in the U. S.  I recently ran across a blog by a man who, back in May of 2016 before the party conventions had selected either Presidential candidate, predicted that Trump would not only be the Republican nominee, but that he'd win too.  Anybody can make a lucky guess, but this gentleman, a writer by the name of John C. Médaille, based his prediction on the fact that ordinary Americans were enraged that their interests have been ignored in favor of the interests of "the Rich, the powerful, the banker, the foreigner."  Of course, our current President belongs to at least two of those categories himself, and Médaille was far from pleased that Trump was probably going to win.  But he was right.

Powerful corporations such as Google and Facebook are able to offer "free" services that compel users to generate content that profits the companies.  Médaille, who believes in an obscure and mostly forgotten system of economics called distributism, sees this sort of thing as an injustice, which brings the matter into the scope of engineering ethics.  Because engineering, broadly speaking, makes everything on the Internet possible, engineers who work for such companies shouldn't simply turn a blind eye to the applications of their code, saying, "All they pay me to do is code.  What they do with the code isn't my business."  Google's code of conduct, summed up in the phrase "Don't be evil," is a masterful exercise in question-begging, namely because at least to my knowledge, it doesn't include a definition of "evil." 

And by the nature of human relations, we can never set out a precisely-written code of conduct that a robot could follow flawlessly, because we're not robots.  We're human beings, each of us a mystical world unto ourselves, and relations among such beings cannot be reduced to mathematical formulas. 

The kerfuffle about the proposed FCC ruling shows that, although our current President ran as the vindicator of the common man and woman, reality may be setting in rather faster than anyone expected—reality being the continuation of a long-term trend of concentration of both economic and political power in the hands of an oligarchic few.  By the nature of modern engineering, most engineers will end up working for medium-size to large corporations, and therefore have a perhaps unconscious bias in favor of policies and actions that favor such corporations. 

However, there are reasons that millions of people in the U. S. have experienced stagnating wages, worsening work conditions, and a lack of genuine opportunities to be a free contributor to the common wealth.  Instead, unless you have reached a certain educational level, your options are nearly all of the "heads we win, tails you lose" variety, and many men in particular have taken the easy way out of simply giving up on work and living off the meager surpluses of welfare and compliant relatives and girlfriends that are available. 

To reverse such trends will take more than an internecine government flap.  It will take first, awareness of the depth and scope of the problem, and second, a willingness to overlook differences and artificial divisions set up by those hoping to keep the masses tranquil, and to do something in a united way that will bring about meaningful change.  But that is a topic for another time.

Sources:  I used material from The Hill's website posted on Apr. 3, 2017 at http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/327107-trump-signs-internet-privacy-repeal., entitled "Trump signs Internet privacy repeal."  That article referred to a blog by a person described as "AT&T's top lobbyist" Bob Quinn at https://www.attpublicpolicy.com/privacy/reversing-obamas-fcc-regulations-a-path-to-consumer-friendly-privacy-protections/, which I also referred to.  John C. Médaille's prediction of Trump's triumph and his mixed feelings about it can be read at http://distributistreview.com/cassandra-calls-election/.  Another blog of mine on distributism can be found at http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-is-distributism-and-why-should.html.

Will Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications Ever Get On the Road?

With all the recent attention on self-driving cars occasioned by the first fatality involving such vehicles, the advent of "talking cars"—cars that communicate wirelessly via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications—has taken a back seat, so to speak.  But V2V ultimately promises to be a vital link in the chain of technologies that will make driverless vehicles possible, as well as making ordinary human-driven cars safer. 

The basic idea is this.  Each V2V-equipped vehicle has a transmitter and receiver that operate in a 5.9-GHz (microwave) wireless band.  By one proposed standard, each car transmits its location, speed, direction, and other relevant data ten times a second to any other car in a thousand-yard (~910-meter) radius.  Other cars equipped with V2V can use this data to keep pace as a following vehicle, or to avoid a collision with a car that is still out of visual sight—around a corner, for instance—but on a collision course.  Some government experts estimate that if every vehicle on the road was equipped with V2V, the number of accidents not related to impaired drivers (alcohol, etc.) could be reduced by as much as 80%.  So what's the holdup? A couple of things.

First it turns out that, according to a recent Associated Press report, the main federal agency boosting V2V and prescribing an industry standard for it is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which is now locked in a battle with another agency, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  The bone in this dogfight is the microwave band that V2V needs to use.  The FCC, leaned on by powerful wireless-comm companies, wants to reallocate that part of the spectrum for wireless internet users.  But a recent technical paper examined the tradeoffs involved in reducing the bandwidth used by V2V, and showed that even the currently contemplated 75 MHz of spectrum might not be wide enough to allow virtually error-free transmission, which is what is needed in this safety-critical application.

Aside from the radio-spectrum issue, there is a question of security.  The NHTSA has had enough imagination to build in a complex security protocol for V2V.  You can easily think of ways to use V2V nefariously.  For example, crooks in an escape car being chased by cops could use a false V2V signal to tell the cop car that it's about to have a head-on collision, and the cops would slam on the brakes—if they trusted what the car told them.  This assumes that the V2V information is used only as warnings to the driver, but sooner or later automakers are going to take the driver out of the loop and allow the V2V information to be used directly by the car's control mechanisms—brakes, steering, accelerator, etc. 

So in order to prevent such shenanigans, the NHTSA has devised a complicated security system that involves digital certificates, public-key infrastructure encryption, and a lot of other things that apparently have never been combined in such an elaborate way before.  It's nice that they have thought to make each car anonymous and to ensure that potential hackers will have lots of trouble hijacking the system, but even the NHTSA itself admits they haven't worked all the bugs out of this security process yet.

The closest analogy I can think of between the proposed V2V system and anything we have now is the air-traffic control system that uses active transponders on each aircraft.  The need for security in air-traffic control is a lot less, because there are a lot fewer planes than there are cars, the Federal Aviation Administration is looking over the airlines' shoulder all the time, and there was already an extensive radar-based air-traffic control system in place before the transponders were added.  With V2V, there is no centralized control, only a lot of cars talking with each other, so the technical challenge is harder.

Even if the automakers started selling V2V-equipped cars tomorrow, it would be twenty years, by some estimates, before nearly all cars on the road would be so equipped.  And until then you couldn't count on doing things with V2V such as traveling in closely-spaced packs or caravans on freeways, because even one non-V2V car in the pack would throw everything off. 

Still, if auto insurers find that V2V-equipped vehicles really do get involved in accidents at a significantly lower rate, they're likely to offer insurance discounts for such cars.  And while consumer behavior is not entirely predictable, buying a car that automatically lowers your insurance rate would be a strong incentive for car buyers to upgrade to V2V sooner rather than later.  However, the insurance companies aren't going to do that until they have a few years of data to base their price tables on.  And that won't happen till there's a significant deployment of V2V-equipped cars.  So we have a chicken-and-egg problem. 

Close to thirty years ago now, right after digital ICs capable of generating voice-quality audio came out, the car makers experimented with another kind of talking car.  If you sat down and didn't fasten your seat belt, this woman's voice came out of nowhere and nagged you to fasten it.  That kind of talking car quickly disappeared.  The V2V idea shows promise of making cars a lot safer without a lot of complexity added, except for the system issues involved with spectrum allocation and security.  I hope that the two fighting executive-branch agencies can work out a reasonable compromise so that people can both stream video as much as they want (or are willing to pay for), and drive in safer cars.  But so far, we're not there yet.

Sources:  The Associated Press article "Auto tech industries clash over future of talking cars" was carried in the print edition of the Austin American-Statesman of Aug. 27, 2016, and appeared in other venues such as the Aug. 25 online edition of the Los Angeles Times at http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-talking-cars-20160825-snap-story.html.  I also referred to a technical paper by Lei Shi and Ki Wong Sung, "Spectrum Requirement for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication for Traffic Safety," available at https://www.metis2020.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/VTCSpring_2014_Shi_etal_SpectrumRequirementForV2VCommunication.pdf, and articles on V2V security at https://www.contrastsecurity.com/security-influencers/v2v-communications

and http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/significant-security-challenge-new-vehicle-communication-standard.