Spectrum Policy
From Pete Ashdown Campaign Collaboration Wiki
America currently has a spectrum policy designed around the technological limitations of the 19th and 20th centuries. We currently grant monopoly useage of a vital and valuable set of frequencies to incumbent users. This is like demanding that everyone in a stadium remain silent so that one person may speak. The reason for this legal regime was a legitimate technological limitation of the era: interference. With modern software-tuned radio technology and our vastly increased understanding of radio wave propagation and signal discrimination, there is no longer any technological justification for these monopolistic grants in practical perpetuity of a vital public resource.
We should base spectrum policy on avoiding actual interference with signals, no longer on potential interference. Now that we are able to build more intelligence into recievers and transmission devices to avoid and filter out interference, our spectrum policy can be vastly more flexible and responsive to market conditions. We can, for a time, continue to accommodate incumbent high-power transmitters while still opening large amounts of the spectrum for public domain unlicensed use in a variety of low-power and interference-avoiding uses.
We have seen explosive growth and rapid innovation in the very limited unlicensed spectrum we currently have. Cordless phones, digital communications such as Wi-Fi, and a myriad of consumer applications have been crowded into a very small section of the spectrum. We could unleash entreprenuerial competition and innovation in yet more applications should some of wavelengths with the best properties (penetration of water and structures especially) become available for unlicensed use on a actual interference basis. The comercially valuable television spectrum, which is very inefficently used at present, could be put to use to foster innovative and valuable new technologies and services, rather than supporting the monopolistic rents of incumbent broadcasters whose business model is based in the last century.
Finally, we need to ensure that the public is getting maximum value for any leasing of exclusive spectrum use rights to private entities. The usable spectrum is increasing a vital economic resource, equal to if not more important than tangible assets such as real estate and mineral resources. Our government owes it to the public to extract as much value as possible from any exclusive uses, and the government should use those resources to ensure that all Americans have actual usage of their digital freedom of speech.
A radio emission is directly analogous to the human voice. In the latter case the human body creates sound waves to communicate with other humans within range. In the former, technology allows humans to broadcast EM waves to all with the technology to recieve the signal. In both cases the purpose is to communicate the ideas which keep a society free and vital. We would not tolerate a society in which the government granted monopolicy rights to talk to a priviledged few, yet we have long tolerated just such a situation for use of the EM spectrum. The technological constraints which have justified such an infringement of American's right to communicate freely via the EM spectrum have now dropped away. Americans must reassert their right to speak freely using the EM spectrum, which belongs to them, and for which the state is only a trustee.
