>>193222, >>193225, >>193226, >>193227, >>193228, >>193229, >>193230
Brendan Carr @BrendanCarrFCC - You’re missing the fundamental legal and factual distinctions between broadcast on the one hand and cable or newspapers etc on the other.
Broadcasters are using a public resource that is owned by the American people (spectrum) to distribute their programming—and doing so for free.
Newspapers and cable shows are not. They are using privately owned cables or other privately owned distribution channels.
And, in the broadcast context, one person’s use of a band is incompatible with anyone else’s use of a band (interference, Kilkenny Cats etc). It’s less about “scarcity” in the sense of broadcast being the only means of distribution and more about scarcity in the interference sense.
Again, this is different than cable or newspaper distribution. As a matter of physics, you can have unlimited newspapers and cable shows distributed to a town. That’s not the case with programming distributed over broadcast spectrum.
Also, in the broadcast context, the government picks winners and losers among competing stakeholders that want to use those particular frequencies.
Not the case with cable or newspapers.
Broadcasters agreed on the front end to operate in the public interest, too. They made a deal with the American people. Operate in the public interest in exchange for billions in government subsidized distribution.
Not the case with cable or newspapers.
So, in exchange for free access to a valuable public resource and government enforced exclusivity over those particular airwaves, broadcasters agreed to operate on terms that are fundamentally different than a cable show or newspaper.
It is much more than “one is licensed and another is not and so we should just license it all.” There are significant legal and factual distinctions and those distinctions are why the Supreme Court permits regulation of broadcasters that probably would not survive scrutiny if applied to other distribution technologies.
Fin.
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Joe Kane @thejoekane
One weird thing about this argument is that it entails that if the government nationalized and licensed newspapers (as it did with spectrum), then it would be ok to regulate their content.
But that would obviously make the First Amendment violation worse, not better.