Who+owns+the+airwaves?

Who owns the airwaves? Electronic communications can travel from one point to another in two basic ways: over physical media (usually copper wiring or fibre optic tubes) or through the airwaves. Radio has been around for a long time; it involves encoding information (in the early days, just sound) into sine waves and sending them through the air at a particular frequency. Today, we are immersed every day in invisible radio waves - over the air TV broadcasts and AM/FM radio transmissions, emergency services communications, citizens band communications, cell phone signals and cellular data communications, GPS transmissions, a myriad of remote controls, satellite communications and more. From Extremely Low Frequency (ELF), used to communicate with submarines hundreds of feet under the ocean to Tremendously High Frequency (THF), experimentally used for amateur radio and terahertz computer communications, the radio spectrum and how it works to send voice, music, video and binary data across many feet or miles is really pretty amazing when you think about it. We take it for granted because most of us grew up with it. The airwaves are a bit like the land over which they travel, in that they comprise a vast but finite resource. When the United States was first settled, the amount of land available was so great and the population so small that the land seemed infinite. Today some states, particularly in the crowded northeast, are filling up. That same population explosion, in conjunction with the popularity of wireless technologies, has the airwaves filling up even faster. Under U.S. law, the airwaves above our country theoretically belong to the public, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is charged with regulating their use, granting licenses to broadcasters under the condition they serve the public interest. However, like oil, bandwidth is a valuable commodity and major communications corporations like AT&T, Verizon and others control much of the radio airwave space. In addition, there are at least four competing theories regarding the degree of ownership the public retains when the airwaves are licensed. Some have argued that the whole idea of public ownership is outmoded and discredited. The FCC recently announced plans to set new rules regarding how much of the radio spectrum a single carrier is allowed to control. Part of the plan involves taking back some of the spectrum that's currently allocated to TV broadcasters (since most households now get their TV programming via cable, satellite or over the Internet instead of via an OTA antenna as most families did when I was young). This recouped bandwidth could then be auctioned for use by today's mobile devices, with compensation going back to the TV broadcasters who currently hold those licenses. No matter how much bandwidth is available to satisfy our ever-increasing appetite for wireless communications, though, there are troubling aspects to our growing dependency on these technologies. With smartphones each new model seems to gain more incredible capabilities - but even when I pay almost £700 for a phone, it is really just an expensive brick without all those radios that connect it to the LTE network, the GPS satellite, the Wi-Fi network and so forth. Apple has been granted a patent for technology that would allow it (or the government, or the wireless carrier or whomever they licensed it to) to - over the airwaves - disable the camera functionality of "specific iPhones in certain locations." Now that is scary. It is bad enough that it can shut down your ability to take pictures (and certainly makes the case for carrying a compact camera that is not network-connected), but if it can do that, it could obviously disable other functionalities of your phone, as well. In fact, it could undoubtedly remotely shut it down completely, selectively making it impossible for certain phones (or all the phones in a particular location) to make calls, access the Internet or even turn the phone on and get to the information stored locally. So, despite the concept that we, the people, own the radio airwaves, it seems we really only use them as long as the government sees fit to allow us to do so - much the same situation that we find ourselves in today regarding our land, personal property, money and even our own bodies.