Special Interests

If anyone has ever doubted that special interests were out of control, here’s proof: the National Association of Broadcasters and the RIAA have proposed legislation that would require all cell phones to contain FM radios.

I’m not really sure why I would want an FM radio on my iPhone, when I have over a thousand of my favorite songs on it, or when I can just pull up Pandora and stream music tailored specifically to my tastes. This isn’t to say that having an FM radio on a cell phone wouldn’t be cool, just that making it the law seems rather absurd.

Gary Shapiro, the CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, blasted the idea as “the height of absurdity” and said something everyone has thought about the RIAA for years: “Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace, NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do.” FM radio and the RIAA are yesterday’s news, and they don’t even seem to be aware of it.

My favorite part of the article, though, is the paraphrased argument from a NAB executive: “Most Web-based music services don’t include emergency alerts that radio stations broadcast, he said. Requiring FM receivers in mobile phones would help better inform the public about emergencies or bad weather nearby, he said.”

Without realizing it, he proves once and for all just how out of touch they are. I have the Internet in my pocket, and can be reached instantly 24/7. In the middle of a sandwich shop, I can pull a device out of my shirt pocket and check the weather radar. While waiting in line for the train, I check the news. They look around and see people connected like never before, and what they conclude is apparently, “Those poor people have no way of knowing about major emergencies. What they need is FM radio.”

2 thoughts on “Special Interests

  1. While I completely agree that his argument is totally baseless, what I think he meant is that there is no interruption of regular service to make you aware that there is danger. I kind of agree to this. There have been a couple tornado warning in Waltham, that I just didn’t know about.

  2. Yeah, FM radio is nice, and does have some advantages. (AM radio too, if you’re going to go to the “disaster preparedness” route.) And I still listen to FM radio sometimes. I wouldn’t even mind an FM radio in my phone, though I’d probably use it very rarely.

    What I strongly object to, though, is the notion that the NAB should be able to require, by law, that my cell phone have an FM radio. Or that they should turn around and say, “It’s for your own safety!”

    I’m curious whether FM radios are actually more reliable than a mesh of cell towers, too. The power requirements of broadcast radio are insane, and the ideal place for a transmitter is somewhere like a mountaintop. You can’t practically run a 50,000W transmitter (and that’s output, not power draw) off of batteries, but a cell tower could. And if /some/ cell towers go down, plenty of people are still served by one or more other towers.

    If the goal was actually dissemination of emergency information, they ought to be legislating better cell phone capabilities, not FM radios. There’s no reason a cell tower couldn’t put ‘broadcast’ alerts to everyone in its outgoing signal.

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