by Flemming Funch
David Weinberger has a nice article at Salon about Internet veteran David Reed's thoughts about spectrum. Governments have divided the radio spectrum into bands that are being licensed to big media companies, giving them basically a monopoly on what is being broadcast. It is all based on the idea that radio and TV signals interfere with each other, so there can only be one entity broadcasting on a given frequency in a given area. Interference was a problem with old radio equipment, but it is no longer a valid limitation. Reed says:"Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature."
"There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green. We could instantly hook up to the Internet everyone who can pick up a radio signal, and they could pump through as many bits as they could ever want. We'd go from an economy of digital scarcity to an economy of digital abundance." So, any guess as to why we aren't doing that? Who could possibly benefit from keeping all radio spectrum monopolized in the hands of large media corporations and the military? Gee, that's a hard one.
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