This appears to be good advocacy by a former lawyer of the National Association of Broadcasters. If adopted, it would eliminate archaic regulations enforced by the FCC. The "public ownership" of the airwaves has been used through the years to justify control of content.
raccoonradio: Your thoughts?
If the government says the own something ("public" is a euphemism for government-control), good luck telling them they don't.
The airwaves would be pretty useless if they weren’t regulated.
He chose two obvious but flawed analogies with his “wind” and “sun”.
How about “airspace”? What would commercial flight look like if there was no public control over it? How about roads — what would driving look like if the “public” wasn’t allowed to set any rules about driving on the roads, or off the roads for that matter?
What about water? There are a lot less rules, but what if water was considered a private matter, and you couldn’t control what your neighbor pumped down his well and put in “his” section of the water table?
Or what if you couldn’t stop your neighbor from damming up the stream and taking all the water before it made it to your farm?
We can argue about how much and what type of regulation is needed for the electromagnetic spectrum, but it would be wrong-headed to argue that there should be no regulation of the spectrum — it would be useless.
A specious argument ... the sun and the wind are (virtually) unlimited and renew every day - the broadcast frequencies are very limited. My use of sunlight does not prevent or interfere with my neighbor's use of sunlight - the use of a radio frquency, especially with a high power signal, can obliterate other signals. And so on, and so on ...
Government control of the content over the airwaves is a concern, but hopefully it can be addressed without the absolute chaos that would result from complete deregulation.