Your cell service provider holds the license.
Ham radio exam is not hard, and does not require special training, just some basic knowledge of how radios work and what the regulations are. I don't see what the issue is.
Not only that, but every exam question comes from a published pool of questions [0]. If you can memorize the answers to those questions, then you don’t need to learn anything about how radio works at all.
There's a lot of fundamental infrastructure decentralization that can happen once some of the HAM frequencies allow encrypted use.
What you really want instead is something like the HAM license allowing the use of point to point equipment at higher power and on frequencies reserved for operators that respect the communications medium.
I find it more believable that the government is scared of such technology than that encryption would be such a detriment to the HAM radio community.
That's the problem - hn regularly has threads talking about how decentralized infrastructure is so important. Having a (dialup speed) p2p network that is built on long range connections would be insanely reliable and would probably revolutionize what we think of as the Internet.
- ISPs would be optional
- access to the internet would be the one-time cost of the hardware
- a totalitarian government trying to shutdown the internet would have to hunt down portable repeaters over hundreds of square miles
- the infrastructure would be in the hands of the people, not megacorps like verizon and comcast.
But that requires encryption, and spectrum allocations that can cover the distance.
1: For stupid legacy reasons, I can't use crypto
2: In order to get and hold a license, I have to provide my full name and address, which is then PUBLICLY AVAILABLE
No, I don't care about ham, I care about the many other things you need a ham license for, such as flying drones in some configurations. I never said any of this was an accident, and the cryto stuff is absolutely cold war legacy bs.