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.
What I recall from history (studied very long ago), it was Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover who created the forerunner to the FCC, then known as the FRC (Federal Radio Commission) in the 1920's. I believe the intent was solely focused on the allotment of the spectrum which had descended into chaos when everyone was firing up their own transmitters on frequencies of their choosing.
What's not clear in this proposal is if the deregulation would be confined solely to content. In my opinion, an unfettered, marketplace-oriented environment for content would be ideal with the caveat being that each owner must behave responsibly for what is limited spectrum space.
Therein lies the rub in deregulation. Just who gets those slices of the valuable, scare spectrum? That "public interest" argument, unfortunately, has been used to advance the diversity rules of ownership and even the revocation of a license in the (in)famous Red Lion vs. FCC case decided by the Warren court.
Well put.
The FCC should be strictly limited to enforcing frequencies. The "license" should be issued at cost and then resold on an open market.