Google Wants To Administer the First White Spaces 112
aabelro writes "Google proposes to the FCC to become the administrator of a White Spaces Database containing geo-location information about devices using the free channels in the radio spectrum."
Hmmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The question you have to ask yourself is "Which is the greater evil?"
The money grubbing corporate types at Google or the lobbyist driven bureaucrats in Government?
Since I'm on a "Just say NO! to Google" jihad, I'd have to give it to the paper shufflers in Government...
the answer is (Score:1, Flamebait)
you dont know jack shit. what you term 'lobbyist driven bureaucrats in government' are just a storefront for really evil money grubbing corporate types, like at&t, riaa, time warner et al. had they got their way up until now, the internet you so ordinarily use would have turned into a cable network already.
compared to them, google types come up as clean as an angel.
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I don't know if google type are clean as angels, but at least with google you know up front that they are for profit. With the government, they say they are not for profit when they are all out to make a buck (or a few million) for themselves.
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Google is the worst kind of corporate evil around today. To suggest they are an angel is beyond naive.
ooooh yeaaaaaa.. is iiit. (Score:2)
so, there are corporations that want to gimp internet to being a cable tv so that free expression, uncalled for political ideas, grassroots movements wont be able to flourish. so, they arent the worst corporate evil out there today.
there are companies 'insuring' your health, but weaseling out of their obligations with dubious legal clauses when you hit the hospital, at the risk of your own life. buuut, apparently, they arent the worst corporate evil out there today either.
there are corporations which foster
Ha, nice theory (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been paying attention to US politics since Eisenhower/JFK transition years and I have yet to see this asshat voting out theory turn to practice. What happens is one group of asshats replaces another one. We have two groups of asshats who swap off every other election or so, but the continuation is corrupt government, whistleblowers or potential whistleblowers in government bureaucracy are always afraid of repercussions in their jobs (or worse...). Both those government hijacking groups lobby hard and perpetually to scare the population into "not wasting their vote" on any alternative to the asshat nominee, to insure only asshats get voted for. It is a remarkable effective and simple technique in keeping the asshat party, the one with two wings, in power.
So even if you decide to "run for office yourself" to help clean things up, you are lucky to make it past real local elections, county or above, you toe the asshat party line or ..nothing. You most likely won't get elected, big fat waste of time, and if you do get elected, you are in peril of either being marginalized, or heck, they off people man. The dual wing corrupt asshat "shadow government" just plain do not like honest people who aren't bribed or blackmailed off. Stuff happens to those folks, or they just get completely ignored, one or the other.
The closest we have come to breaking this power sharing corrupt criminal cartel and kleptocracy is the reform party efforts, but they scared the two wing asshat party so much that they decided that they "wouldn't allow" anything *but* asshats on the stage at the big national debates, and the asshat controlled media went along with that. Pretty much knocked the stuffing out of any third party/alternative vote efforts.
The League of Women Voters, to their credit, dropped their sponsorship of the asshat national debates at that time. Which should have been a major clue to the electorate..but around 97% or so now have caved in and decided to "not waste their vote" and have kept electing asshat criminals right along since then. And the asshats make damn sure government is run as a for profit bribery and influence and jobs peddling organization.
Any real mavericks, perhaps with new ideas or..gasp..not corrupt, really honest people, get marginalized and demonized immediately in the controlled asshat press, labeled as "fringe", or they just get completely ignored.
So..my conclusion is..there's about no diff anymore if some corporation or alleged government runs things, the asshats are in charge in both areas, and its the same people with revolving door government to global corporation jobs, etc, where just about everything at the decision making level is done with behind the scenes payoffs and bribes, etc, and our form of government should more fairly and accurately be labeled as a Corporatocracy [wikipedia.org].
It is not as bad as it could get yet, obviously there are some other rather extreme heinously run nations that are even more despotic and corrupt, but this has been the trend and direction, heading towards that total despotism, as long as I have been paying attention.
What is sad and funny at the same time is sitting in the middle, having to shift all around all the time so as not to catch any asshat cooties, and watching both asshat extremes of the vigorous "true believers" types point fingers at each other across some fairy tale imaginary dividing line while they chant in unison "It's all your fault!! If only all of OUR asshats where in charge, things would be just so much bettah!".
Damn funny really.
What this has to do with Google and whitespaces and spectrum, etc I can't say in exact terms, but I am fairly confident to predict that in general terms, which ever policy that will go to ship the most amount of cash into the fewest amount of hands will eventually turn out to be "the" policy or regulation, etc. What asshat spokesmodel they slap in front of that will be mostly irrelevant.
idiot (Score:2)
what you cite there has never happened.
what happens is always to the contrary. some minority private interests, which have more financial or economic power than the majority sponsors candidates, and they win.
this is the story you have been living in the last 150 years. this is the reason you are screwed. dont be fooled by fucked private interest propaganda. 'majority finds out they can get benefits from public treasury' my ass.
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With the government, I can vote the asshats out.
That's the easy part, let us know when you have figured out how to rid the FCC of lobbyist (one of which is Google).
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If you use sites that advertise through them you *are* getting something in return though.
Anywhere you go that google tracks you, they are paying someone for the privilege to track you, that someone provides you a service with that money.
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"With the government, I can vote the asshats out."
Good luck with that. When the killing went down at Chappaquiddick, millions of people said they Ted would never get another vote in this country. But in reality, only the Grim Reaper was able to remove that asshat from office.
There have been literally dozens of politicos that have just sickened me, some of them I've campaigned against. The scummier the lowlife is, the harder he is to get out of office. Teflon Bill? Good grief.
Besides - we in the states
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is government control necessarily "evil"? It's function* is to control social institutions and infrastructure that is otherwise unprofitable to run or should not be run in a for-profit manner. Furthermore, corporations come and go, as do their agendas. Would you want AT&T to be in charge of all IP addresses that were unused back in the 70s when it was the dominant player in telecommunications? In 20 years Google will (hopefully) be just another once-were-innovators.
If this same discussion were happening 10 years ago, the big name putting up their hand to administer it, and would probably have little competition, would be Microsoft. Who'd want that? Google will one day be what Microsoft is today; hated, feared and opposed by pretty much everyone, and all the Google fanboys today will claim then that they never really liked Google the way ex-MS lovers now claim they never liked MS.
Corporations should *never* be given permanent power over social infrastructure. I never understood the willingness of the US population to give fundamentally transient organizations power over social infrastructure. Imagine if SCO actually *did* have control over anything important in the Unix world?
Privatization is *not* the panacea that Americans hold it to be.
(Oh, and I know you're not saying it is, I'm agreeing with and taking further your point.)
* Current implementation of "government" is not what I'm talking about, I'm talking philosophically.
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Anyone as rabidly anti-government as you obviously are has no concept of public goods.
So tell me, Mr. I Hate Anything That Has The Faintest Whiff Of Socialism, how would, in a fully privatized world, roads and streetlights be constructed? Would you prefer a world where you had to put a coin into every streetlight as you passed it or have toll gantries every time you turned a corner onto a new road? Or do you like your "pay taxes once, access for all regardless of use" model? Because, government tax dollars
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If there's no coercion, there's no government, just an organization.
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You cannot separate a philosophic ideal of government from its real world implications. Entrusting a bureaucracy to administer infrastructure you see as vital still creates a ruling class that then becomes entrenched and seeks to protect its own interest.
I do not see a protected bureaucracy as something superior to a corporat
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Therein lies your problem. You cannot give government the power to stop other citizens from encroaching your rights, without giving them the power to stop you encroaching the rights of others. Once you give them that right, you by necessity must give them the latitude to define what constitutes such an encroachment. They then define whatever they decide is in their interests as being in the interests of protecting citizens from each other. Hello, PATRIOT Act. Don't you see? You already have your minimal gov
Separation of powers (Score:1)
That's why you have separation of powers, warrants, process rights, and other safe guards. Patriot act, the no-fly list, Germany's attempted child pornography list, Australia's internet laws are examples of governments removing safeguards w
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In 20 years Google will (hopefully) be just another once-were-innovators.
Really? I hope in 20 years Google is still innovating. While I realize there is a cycle to companies growing and dying (especially as new competitors come to the market), I do not wish for a company to become Just Another Big Company(TM).
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You are right. Acquiring other companies is not very innovative - at least not in the technological sense. My question to you is - what's the problem with it?
You only have to look around a little bit to see that these smaller "competitors" are much more easily able to innovate. They have the flexibility and the "nothing to lose" mentality that makes that a possibility. In addition, you make it sound like buying up a smaller company (I dislike your word "competitors") is a bad thing. I'm pretty sure nob
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It's function* is to control social institutions and infrastructure that is otherwise unprofitable to run or should not be run in a for-profit manner.
Technically, no. It's function is to facilitate transactions between entities in an efficient, stable, and acceptable manner (within the law). Sometimes it has to assume the social responsibility itself to make that happen, but this should NOT be confused with control. There are also many social institutions that are not government controlled (churches, which many are unprofitable btw). I think you are confusing regulation with control. The first implies following some sort of rule of law, while the other
cognitive dissonance (Score:2)
Propaganda (aka PR) for generations on behalf of corporations has suckered the ignorant American public into a warped view of reality.
Even the word socialism has been destroyed; we lack even general terms for the public to use. Populism still exists but is often equated with mob rule over here. Most extremes turn out poorly, democracies are by nature more socialist and populist.
I remember the 80s when we had the peak of anti government hype outside and inside the government (hell we had a corp spokesperson
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I guess government control is no more or less evil than any other control...
I'd would say there are some things the government does well, but having worked with and for the government most of my adult life I really can't think of any. There are however some public resources, such as the radio spectrum that need to be protected and administered in the public interest, and government is the best of the choices we have of who to to do that. So the government needs to be in charge of it. It needs to regulate
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You've never worked in a modern corporation have you?
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Without you providing actual examples, I can only assume you dislike the bureaucracy. The government doesn't have a monopoly on bureaucra
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An international boycott of Google could both change its plans quickly and perhaps put it out of business.
And such a thing actually happens, how often?
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
An international boycott of Google
Your solution advocates a
(*) market-based
approach to solving the Google problem.
Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work:
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
Specifically, your plan fails to account for:
(*) The enormous popularity of Google
(*) International reluctance to engage in sweeping change
(*) A lack of support from famous Musicians and Actors
and the following philosophical objection also applies:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
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We have much more of an ability to make change through the democratic process than we do by trying to scream at/boycott a corporation until we get what we want.
Not that most people know enough about what is going on in the world to change their vote based on something technology related like this, but that'll probably change as more old people die. We have a much better chance of getting people to go out and vote than we do with getting enough people to boycott a corporation.
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I believe a group of people boycotted their government a while back. They were not all thrown in jail, in fact I believe most of them are now referred to as the founding fathers of the United States of America.
The winners always get to write history. If the founding fathers of the USA were to have lost the revolution, they would have been quartered.
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Did I miss a joke here or something?
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A) They had the right and ability to bear arms that were comparable across the board. Having a 9MM simi-auto pistol may protect you against a robber with a handgun, knife or any other type of small arm, but its not going to do anything to a tank, a person with a fully-auto weapon with lots of ammo, a trained sniper, etc. When both groups use muskets its a lot more fair than one group's highest weapons are simi-automatic weapons and the ot
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I believe there are a group of people are boycotting their government in a similar vein right now. They are commonly referred to as the Taliban.
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I believe there are a group of people that are boycotting their government in a similar vein right now. They are commonly referred to as the Taliban.
Really, It's Entered the Realm of Parody: (Score:2)
Eric Schmidt is just one furry white cat and a cigarette-holder short of a Bond villain.
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Re:Hmmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Dont confuse the administrator of the database with the governor of the data therein. Google is just proposing to provide the technical solution, not decide the policies that get someone on the list.
And if Google gets this, the goverment will certainly write into their charter limits on what and when they can charge.
I just dont see an issue here.
mod parent insightful (Score:2)
i posted in this thread. perhaps more iditos who didnt read the article wont come barging in yelping libertarian/republican crap if they understood what was it about.
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really different from other oursourcing by FCC (Score:1)
The FCC currently outsources a lot of activities including frequency coordination, license examinations, and so on.
They can put rules in place in the agreement requiring free access. I had to remind one of their outsourced organizations of that when I wanted access to their database, it was granted.
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The FCC might subcontract to Google.
I honestly don't care who does it, as long as they do a good job of it and remain under the watchful eye of the FCC. Audits, supervision, and whatever else is needed to keep the grunts that actually handle it in line.
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The government is not for profit.
You have no idea how hard I'm trying to keep from falling out of my chair.
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The government is not for profit.
You have no idea how hard I'm trying to keep from falling out of my chair.
As soon as I finished reading the OP (just to make sure there was no /sarcasm tag) I scrolled down to make sure someone had responded to that little nugget of hilarity. Two responses, so far. There's hope for humanity, yet...
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I trust Corps more than I trust the Gov. I trust a Corp to act in its own self interest damn the rest, as for the Gov we live in a Republic motives change depending whose in charge.
I'm not opposed to a Corp being in charge of the white space but I am opposed to it being Google because of the conflict of interest.
Re:Oddly, Google could be the good guy here (Score:2)
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The FCC is not necessarily always trustworthy, IMHO. They were scolded by a federal court when they tried to force adoption of BPL [wikispaces.com] because they "...failed to satisfy the notice and comment requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act ('APA') by redacting studies on which it relied in promulgating the rule and failed to provide a reasoned explanation for its choice of the extrapolation factor for measuring Access BPL emissions." [ source ] [arrl.org]
The long and short of this story is that the FCC wanted BPL deploy
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ummm, where to you get the idea that government is not for profit?
The only difference between government and a corporation is who gets the profit.
Corporation - profits go to investors, private sector workers.
Government - profits go to public sector workers, bureaucrats
The rest is all the same. Driving business to their industry...
Take a look at the drug war. It's a business for police officers, prison guards, lawyers...
Or take a look at public education. it's a business for teachers and teacher unions.
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Ten years from now when the founders leave, I may not.
Its innovative to give Google 5years, no more, no less to do it.
They will do a fantastic job, but it should go out to bid [fbo.gov], shouldn't it?
Not all feds are good, and not all feds are bad. I didn't always believe it, but I now do. [but thats a POLL I imagine...]
Heres something the feds won't do as well as we are. [wikispeedia.org]
Inevitable (Score:1, Offtopic)
Didn't we know Google was after administrating white space for the past five years? [artima.com]
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The Database and its administration will be paid for either directly through some form of fees or indirectly through taxes. In neither case is it free, its just a matter of who gets the bill.
It is highly unlikely the FCC is going to hire civil servants to develop and maintain such a database in any case. If they do it will take longer, cost more, and have more problems. Why? Because the government is the only entity with even more beaucracy and inefficiency than large corporations, and less direct incen
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The government is not for profit. Google is completely for profit.
Governments are FOR-profit organizations. Its just that they arent trying to profit from it's citizens (that would be like eating yourself). The semantics get funny because governments print money but in the true sense or the word they certainly do.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Profit [thefreedictionary.com] -
profit (prft) n. 1. An advantageous gain or return; benefit.
well no. (Score:2)
when the administration changes, fcc will become the influence area of another private interest block. it may happen to be the at&t - riaa - media cartel that seek to undermine everyone in the digital age for their own interest.
google is there to stay. the company vision is sound and reliable. it wont just change in 4 years. brin and page dont seem to be retiring or dying anytime soon, so the vision will keep going like this and even strengthening in future.
you would be much better off relying on google
This is just like... (Score:2, Funny)
These aren't the droids you're looking for, move along.
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It is like making a fat man the pizza delivery boy... did that work for you?
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Two pizza delivery vehicles start 5 miles apart. One drives 85 miles/hr south, the other 90 miles/hr west. How many vehicles will they destroy before they crash into a garbage truck 7 miles out of their way when looking for the correct address while texting each other about the beers they are drinking?
Oh wait, we need to mention pizza's somewhere in there to keep it as a pizza analogy and not a math problem or a car analogy. Ok, and then they threw chairs at the pizza's.
MInification (Score:1)
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We see now that Google's hiring of Guido von Rossum was only the first step in their evil plan to dominate the world of white space.
(just a joke; I love Python)
say it loud (Score:1, Funny)
White spaces? What about Black Spaces and Latino Spaces and Asian Spaces?
Google is attempting to monopolize racism!
Fox, meet henhouse (Score:5, Interesting)
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Conspiracy Theory... (Score:5, Funny)
Article is Misleading (Score:1)
This is *not* about gated communities; rather, it has to do with allocating the radio spectrum.
Google slogan mmm (Score:5, Funny)
Google slogan : "Don't be evil"
Google slogan in 5 years : "Don't be soooo evil"
Google slogan in 10 years : "Just don't be as evil as Satan himself"
Google slogan in 20 years : "All your arses are belong to us"
Re:Google slogan mmm (Score:4, Funny)
No. (Score:3, Interesting)
The FCC should have responsibility for this,and so should maintain the data.
Google wants to get a foot in the door to be able to control/promote a wireless carrier in this spectrum.
And that I don't much mind. But they should have to pay, or at least compete, for that space.
In a way, this is worse than the major carriers playing tic-tac-toe with spectrum auctions.
Not the only administrator... (Score:1)
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If by "obvious choice" you mean "obvious choice not to run it due to privacy concerns" then I agree.
There's no way I'd want Google to be able to geolocate devices, considering how much information Google already collects about people.
Bad idea (Score:5, Funny)
The first thing a hacker would do is use a trim() function and destroy all the data...
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Has this all been thought out? (Score:2, Informative)
I've never been comfortable with the entire White Space approach, especially the database idea. A big problem is that primary users are only protected out to a predetermined contour, not to their actual range as used in the field. For example, TV stations are only protected out to a given contour (a specific distance out from the tower, where the station's signal strength is predicted to weaken to a predetermined threshold) specified in their license. However, many, many people in rural areas watch over-
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Nope, it's on the channel, just far enough away (physically) that the television station's service area is not (supposed to be) affected.
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You're leaving out a major stipulation of the FCC's ruling: whitespace devices must listen before transmitting, not just query the database. They can't just check the database and begin broadcasting. Not only does that potentially cause the interference with the primary user you're concerned about, it could easily run right over the top of other whitespace devices, thereby seriously limiting their utility.
Given the listen before transmit rule, and given that the rural areas you're talking about have the l
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You're right, but I was trying not to complicate the argument. Consider the situation, though: The farmer needs a tall tower (30m is not unusual), a high-gain (10-15 dB), directional antenna, plus a low-noise, high-gain mast-mounted preamplifier to watch his television. What are the odds that the sensing system associated with a secondary user also will be able to de
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I'm not so sure I believe your contention that a directional antennae on a mast is going to be more sensitive than the sensing system a whitespace device must have. The FCC rules say that sensing system must be sensitive down to -114dBm. It seems ATSC tuners aren't able to pull in a signal at less than -84dBm. But ok, let's assume the whitespace device still won't notice the TV signal. I would argue that a 30m mast and a directional antennae means there's a fair chance a whitespace device's signal won't
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Ooohh, yes, they will -- for any number of reasons: (1) the shielding of the television set itself is finite, and certainly less than +20 dBm - (-84 dBm) = 104 dB at RF; and (2) the nulls in the antenna pattern are certainly less than 40 or 50 dB, especially when scattering from nearby objects is considered; just to think of two reasons. Try it and see.
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I think we're going to have to declare a truce here, and agree to disagree. Perhaps we can meet again in five years and see whose vision of the future came to pass?
Let's.
In my more apathetic moments, I feel sure that not even a commercial juggernaut the size of Google is capable of fixing broadband in America. The other, much more entrenched commercial juggernauts that have been busily beavering away at converting American citizens into Consumers have a long head start.
In America's younger days, when corporations couldn't be bothered to provide electricity service to rural locations, rural people took matters into their own hands, formed co-ops, and ran wire. Lik
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I'm curious. How is it that the Primary user with a truckload of fancy gear has no internet access to query the database but the secondary user, who is very close by, does have internet access to query the database?
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Because the Primary user is mobile, or at least portable, and the Secondary user can be fixed (and at least tied to a landline, if nothing else). A lot of the rural US has no cell phone coverage -- trust me.
I see no problem with it (Score:2)
We don't plan to become a database administrator ourselves, but do want to work with the FCC to make sure that a white spaces database gets up and running. We hope that this will unfold in a matter of months, not years.
and
Google proposes the operation of a WSDB for at least 5 years, promising to “transfer to a successor entity the Database, the IP addresses and URLs used to access the Database, and the list of registered Fixed WSDs” in case they cannot live up to it. Google proposal does not limit the possibility of existing other such databases.
They're not proposing to do it on their own and willing to hand over everything if they fuck it up.
Whitespace? (Score:1)
While they're at it, why don't they create a Brainfucks database. Now that would be useful.
Looking forward to see the API bindings on Google Code.
Evil is as Evil does. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is simply a way to monetize something that was intended to be free.
Free or not, where there is a demand, the market will create itself and Google plans on being there first. I RTFA and it seems to me that they are just trying to "grade" a whitespace based on its physical location and the devices at that location. So and so coordinates, with yada-yada using it. Check. The database is simply to let those users know who is who, and where.
The next step would be, in my mind, to strangle the supply of whitespace by camping as many geo-locations as possible.
(wow, that actually sounds like fun...Pitch a tent and roast marshmallows!)
My first impulse(were I without a conscience) would be to lease/mount a transmitter on every cell tower out there, specifically to fill whitespace. It could simply broadcast old Jimmy Swaggart reruns or simply white-noise. Just keep it filled to claim priority. After all, the idea is to keep people from interfering with ANY other transmissions...even if it is someone simply camping the whitespace there. This is basically a Land-Rush on the whitespace, and the lawyers think that mapping it all will give them something to work with...some sort of claim of rights to that whitespace.
When you have most of it camped, you are then in a position to start making deals.
Market created.
The problem is eventually that "non-existent" market will drive use to the point it actually WOULD interfere with adjacent frequencies...exactly what was trying to be prevented by the creation of whitespaces.
Back to square one with Google making truckloads of cash in the process.