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What's a commercial .org for? I'm on the phone with an old buddy who's wondering about sorting his open source company's content between the company .com and .org sites. My own feeling is that .org ought to be purely for developers and for development concerns, and everything else ought to go to the .com side. This is how it works with Zelerate (.org and .com) and Jabber (.org and .com). What do ya'll think? From Low to No
Known as the Radio Broadcasting Preservation Act of 2000, the law takes power away from the F.C.C. — an independent regulatory agency — to issue important rules for licenses for FM radio stations and gives it to Congress, where the biggest broadcasters have considerably more influence. I've been all for community radio ever since I read Lorenzo Milam's Sex and Broadcasting during the Nixon administration. (I was even involved in a number of efforts to make it happen.) But with Dubya likely to replace the excellent Bill Kennard with fellow commissioner (and Colin Powell offspring) Michael Powell, who opposes LPFM, the plan is toast in any case. However, something that rarely gets mentioned in all the handwringing about LPFM is how few openings actually exist. The history of broadcasting has been an endless series of victories by greed over engineering, and the result has been an oversaturation of both radio bands, leaving little room for LPFM even in most outlying suburban areas. For proof, play with the FCC's LPFM Channel Finder. Some engineers tell me it has problems, but it gives you a pretty good idea of how much nothing is actually out there. Oh, and you know who does a better job than anybody at finding sort-of-empty frequencies and putting out signals all over the place for noncommercial service to their communities? Try Christian radio. Mark my words: the majority of new community radio stations that come on after this stripped-down LPFM scheme becomes law, will be operated by and for religious organizations. Hey, good for them. Truth be told, darn few of the rest of us actually give a shit. At least not about the steam-powered broadcast bands. Meanwhile there are something like 30,000 new "stations" on the Web. How long before the NAB gets both Congress and Michael Powell to try regulating them? Any bets?
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