Privatize the Airwaves
Wednesday, March 22, 2000
By: Robert W. Tracinski
FCC's Decision to Create "Free Market" for Some Broadcast Frequencies Highlights Need to Set All Airwaves Free from Government Ownership
Last week, the FCC took a timid first step toward an idea that should be implemented fully: private, unregulated ownership of the airwaves.
The agency announced plans to allow some broadcast license-holders to buy and sell access to their frequencies. These licensees will be able, for example, to sell broadcasting rights on a given frequency to several wireless broadcast firms, which would use the frequency at different times of day. The FCC hopes this approach will be more "innovative and efficient" and will result in "a free market in spectrum."
Obviously, this new system is a far cry from a full-fledged free market. It applies only to a small group of frequencies, and broadcasters are still regulated by the FCC. But it does introduce the beginnings of privatization--the system that should have been established when the first radio stations took to the air 80 years ago, and that ought to be applied to all broadcast frequencies today.
Under current policy, radio frequencies are considered "public property," which means that they are owned by the government and merely licensed to private broadcasters, which operate by government permission. This arrangement--a relic of socialist central planning--gives the FCC a stranglehold over the industry, including a dangerous power to censor broadcasters.
The rationale for this system was that "no one created the airwaves," and so no one was entitled to own them. But this premise is false. Broadcast frequencies as such did not exist until the first radio was invented. The innovators who discovered how to broadcast on these frequencies and the businessmen who built the antennas were the ones who literally created the airwaves. They turned a previously unknown and unusable realm into a medium of communication.
But the federal government arrogated to itself sole ownership of this medium, and it has continued to dictate terms to the creators of the airwaves--and to charge them for the privilege. Today, for example, an unprecedented number of new frequencies are being opened up as telecommunications firms develop new broadcast technologies--especially for wireless telephone and Internet service--and expand into previously unused frequency bands. Yet as these firms invest in research and development, and build antennas and satellites, they must wait for the FCC to approve the new frequencies and to auction off broadcast licenses. The innovators are being charged billions of dollars to buy back the frequencies they opened up in the first place.
We are in the midst of a telecommunications revolution, the creation of a wireless information superhighway. But the government's unearned ownership of the airwaves serves as both a roadblock and a toll obstructing the way.
More ominous, the FCC has the power to decide whether the content of a broadcast is "in the public interest" and to revoke the license of any broadcaster failing to meet this non-objective standard.
Until the 1980s, for example, the FCC enforced the so-called Fairness Doctrine, which forced broadcasters to air political views they disagree with--the equivalent of forcing National Review to carry articles defending abortion, or forcing Mother Jones to publish paeans to big business. More recently, we have seen an escalating series of threats to broadcasters' licenses over the portrayal of violence or the absence of "family values." In a recent debate, for example, would-be presidential candidate Alan Keyes stated that, if he were president, he would have the FCC revoke the licenses of broadcasters that do not meet his standard of "decency." Keyes may have no chance of becoming president, but the fact is that the FCC has the legal power to impose this kind of censorship at any time in the name of "the public."
Consider the consequences for free speech if the government declared itself sole owner of all printing presses and licensed them to newspapers and magazines so long as they operate "in the public interest." That is precisely the system imposed on broadcasters.
The solution to this stifling nationalization of the airwaves is a systematic program of privatization. Broadcasters should function not by permission, but by right. They should be granted free-and-clear ownership of their frequencies, and Congress should create objective rules by which innovators can stake their claims on previously unused frequencies--a Homestead Act for the airwaves. The airwaves do not belong to "the public"; they do not belong to the government. Like all goods in a capitalist system, they should be privately owned. This would make possible a genuine free market in broadcast spectrum--and it would liberate the nation's broadcasters and telecommunications innovators from the arbitrary control of the state.
