I take it, then, that you would have no problem with my 10 megawatt spark gap transmitter being set up in your neighborhood?
templar: I take it, then, that you would have no problem with my 10 megawatt spark gap transmitter being set up in your neighborhood?
You are thinking inside too small a box. That is, you are thinking entirely inside the broadcast paradigm. Your model is, more power for me, him good. Less power for my neighbor's use, him bad.That is vacuum-tube thinking at a time when every Tom, Dick, and Harry is walking around with a radio transmitter called a cellular phone. The crucial issue is how far the radio signal needs to carry before it is picked up by a repeater, and in this day and age that need not be very far. If the technology of the cellular phone were applied to the implementation of broadcasting, why would it take more for you to broadcast throughout the area covered by a 50,000 watt AM radio station than it would to make cell-phone calls to the four corners of the area served by that 50,000-watt transmitter?
Looked at that way, the scarcity of bandwidth for broadcasting--at least, voice-quality broadcasting--in a metropolitian area is an almost perfect anachronism. What the FCC has done, and what the FCC evidently considers its charter to maintain, is to consolidate PR power beyond even what the high-speed printing press did in the nineteenth century.
What is the difference between the INTERNET and TV? Generally speaking, the difference is video quality. Video quality, and the creation by the FCC of scarce, high-quality easily accessed addresses. If you compare FreeRepublic.com to channel 2, the latter is accessed in high-speed at decent quality with a $60 plug-and-play receiver, the former is a different character of programming altogether. FR is far superior in its accessibility for transmitting to anyone in the world who has INTERNET access and knows the name of FreeRepublic.com, buried among millions of competing web sites.
Speech and printing are enumerated First Amendment freedoms;American society is accustomed--one might say, addicted--to broadcast entertainment, including broadcast journalism. I know of no political policy which I could recommend which would detoxify the resulting "sheeple" and strip those "noble" broadcasters of their titles of nobility.
listening and reading are derivitive freedoms.Thus the equality of accessibility to writing on the Internet
(and thus of reading on it) make perfect constitutional sense--whereas the government-instituted inequality of communication on broadcast cannot be translated to world of in-person speech or of printing without direct contravention of the First Amendment.
But do not accuse me of not having tried to think the issue through.