I do know more and more folks are going pirate, video as well. That's definetly wallet-oriented. The net is the best, as long as it stays up, and I'm all for radio nets as backup and in addition to. Not holding me breath on the supremes doing their thing past this hesitant "living breathing document" they always stretch around. It's backwards anyway, the laws shouldn't go into effect until AFTER a review if any sort of common sense ruled.
That's one of the two things I would have changed if I had been one of the founders writing and arguing back then, that and the "promote the general welfare'. GEEZ, just that little wiggler has caused HUGE amounts of trouble, I want to go back in time and whack some wigged dudes with the stupid stick on that one..
So, there's only two options, take over a broadcast network, or scare the ones remaining so bad they start to get it "right". Fox kinda sorta is headed in the right direction, but still...... it needs to happen, even if it's 'entertainment" it would still be better than getting PO'ed every night. And it would be far less dangerous..
;^)
Well, I'm an ME not an EE, but I can tell you that, even within the frequency band alloted to broadcasting, the number of stations which can be created without interference depends on the power you allow each individual station to transmit. Thus, it would have been possible to create a lot more stations if each one had been limited to a lower power. But of course it was a novelty to be able to receive word from the big city in real time, even when you were in your car--so people thought it was wonderful to have these powerful stations. Failing to consider that they were ceding political power to those stations in the process.
And that is just looking at past history. In the here-and-now we can look at our communications system as a whole and see that the Internet allows anyone to set up a web site, allowing anyone else in the world access to whatever you want to put up on your site. At this point the broadcast stations are merely preferential addresses. You can access your local TV station, or CNN--or you can access FR. But it takes a lot more of a rig to access FR, and plenty of people who would enjoy FR don't even know it exists--whereas anyone with a TV and cable will stumble on CNN soon enough.
So the truth is that the FCC formatted the spectrum and created those preferred addresses--even the extended ones on cable or satellite tv. And the FCC licenses all those channels, one way or another--if you consider that they depend on satellite transmission licenses even if they are not broadcast directly to your set.
But it is the broadcast licensees such as ABC and CBS which most obviously have their preferential positions courtesy of the Federal Government. They are exploiting a preferential treatment by the government, and if they stopped getting it everyone else in the country would still have the same rights to publish their opinions as they do now. And it is the right of the people to publish (within the limits of their individual wallets) which the First Amendment protects. The dirty little secret is that the preference granted to my speech if I have a broadcast license downgrades the effectiveness of your speech if you don't. So you have a cause to object.
The FCC could legally shut them down instantly by revoking their licenses--and "First Amendment" objections would be hollow.