Imagine a room where everyone shouted at the top of their
lungs, nonstop, while setting off air horns.
"After that, they decided that fed regulators would divide up the radio
spectrum into bands, and give those bands to exclusive licensees who'd
know that their radio waves would reach their destination without being
clobbered, because any clobberers would get shut down by the cops.
"But today, we've got a better way: We can make radios that are capable
of intelligently cooperating with each other. We can make radios that
use databases or just finely tuned listeners to determine what bands
aren't in use, at any given moment, in any place. They can talk between
the gaps in other signals. They can relay messages for other
radios. They can even try to detect the presence of dumb radio devices,
like TVs and FM tuners, and grab the signal they're meant to be
receiving off of the Internet and pass it on, so that the dumb device
doesn't even realize that the world has moved on.
"Now, the original radio rules were supposed to protect free expression
because if everyone was allowed to speak at once, no one would be
heard. That may have been true, but it was a pretty poor system as it
went: Mostly, the people who got radio licenses were cops, spooks, and
media barons. There aren't a lot of average people using the airwaves to
communicate for free with one another.
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