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October 19, 2005
Sliceable spectrum
Sliceable spectrum: Important article, I think... Forbes profiles Eben Moglen, chief legal officer at the Free Software Foundation (GPL, etc), with a public discussion of the reality that radio spectrum, while finite, can be broken down into finer and finer divisions as technology advances. TV and radio frequency assignments are now 'way fatter than they need to be, being based on the requirements of rotary tuning dials and other equipment made during the 1920s through 1950s. It's not like real estate, although our regulations still treat it as such. Current "spectrum landowners" have no incentive to change, because their current assignments steadily increase in value. Various governments have little incentive to change, because the apportionment flows economic juice into their decisionmaking apparatus. But our communication needs are increasing rapidly, and we're all paying the price for setting "land lots" at sizes dictated by antique radio equipment. (I'm dramatically over-simplifying, sure, but that's the basic situation today... I first got hipped to this stuff in the 90s through the excellent Reason Magazine... I was frustrated through the spectrum debates two years ago because this is a very tricky term to search for in archives.) The Forbes article later gets into opensource and the regional First Amendment, but I'm not sure of their direct relevance here... makes me suspect there's some campaign which just happens to use a basic truth of spectrum regulation as a stepping-stone argument (Fox Network is the repeated yet sole example given, for instance). Interfering with someone else's speech should be handled as a tort, but we don't really have effective prevention of boombox abuse yet, so the path may be tricky. But I agree with the first point Moglen makes, that radio frequency is hobbled not by true scarcity, but by artificial regulation... I'm glad to hear this being discussed.
Posted by John Dowdell at October 19, 2005 7:27 AM