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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

I, for one, don't believe that the state has the moral authority to "auction" the airwaves.

What makes 600mhz constitutionally distinct from 400hz? If the answer is "nothing," then it seems that the state can auction the air surrounding my vocal chords, deciding which vibrations are ad are not permissible.

If free speech is to mean anything in the information age, it must apply across a broad, useful, reasonable spectrum just as much as the tiny slivers which happen to be visible or audible to human eyes and ears.

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You'll find that HN has bipolar disorder when it comes to libertarian positions:

Upvotes for:

+ Privacy, opposing mass-surveillance

+ Opposing cronyism

Downvotes for:

+ Free markets in education, healthcare, housing

+ Opposing "common sense safety" regulations

You would think that such an intellectual crowd would have more tolerance and curiosity for new ideas. But you would be wrong.

That's not bipolar disorder; if it was an individual, it would just be having an ideology that doesn't neatly align for or against a particular common archetype.

In the case of HN, it's both not particularly accurate and, to the extent it is at all accurate, is a mixture of some people not aligning with popular archetypes and people that do align with both libertarian and anti-libertarian archetypes being present in significant numbers in the HN community.

These positions don't seem incompatible to me.

The answer is not nothing.

They have different characteristics: Propagation, attenuation, power consumption, penetration through walls/building, crosstalk, bandwidth...

Short version: do you want to have a 10 inches antenna on your phone, or your TV?

> They have different characteristics: Propagation, attenuation, power consumption, penetration through walls/building, crosstalk, bandwidth...

I mean... I'm not stupid. I realize that.

But do these differences rise to the level of constitutional distinction for the purposes of protections under the 1st amendment (and its philosophical underpinnings)? I assert that the answer is unequivocally "no."

It may be that these sorts of regulations made sense for the past 100 years, but I don't think that they do for the next.

I don't know what regulations you have in mind but the frequency spectrum absolutely needs to be managed.

Do you believe in private property?

Within reason, sure.

But declaring the overwhelming majority of electromagnetic waves to be the purview of the state and its friends is, to my way of thinking, far from reasonable.

What does this even mean?

There are branches of libertarianism that believe resources should not be sold by governments, but rather as commons.

Some of them also believe in private property which is always annoying.

I'm not sure how to make it more clear: that the state does a dis-service by claiming dominion over the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

If one needs to pay to transmit at convenient and reasonable frequencies, at reasonable levels of signal strength, then speech on the spectra in question is simply not free.

I am very much concerned that, outside the visible and audible spectra, along with slivers of 800Mhz, 2.4Ghz, and 5Ghz, that basic free speech is no longer the default.

> the state does a dis-service by claiming dominion over the entire electromagnetic spectrum

The alternative is the guy with the loudest transmitter wins.

I don't think that's true, any more than thinking that everybody will be zombifed heroin addicts in the absence of drug prohibition.

My CB radio would like to have a word with you.

Haha... Yeah you're not wrong there.

nIs Downtown James Brown still around? I haven't used CB in a few years.

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