Capitalism needs a check in the form of a strong government because without one, it will consume every available resource in service of privatizing and charging for resources that used to be available to all, like an economic plague. The joke can of "Perri-Air" from Spaceballs will be our actual future if we don't stop it.
> The FCC’s attempt to balance science and commerce was not well-accepted by said scientists, who took their story to the media.
This suggests to me that the government had enough strength to make an enforceable ruling, but very nearly made a ruling that would have not prioritized science in the way that the radio astronomers would have wanted.
It took something else (public attention, persistent outreach by scientists, etc) for the FCC to come to the ruling that it ultimately came to.
If the VP for Channel Allocation at Marconi made that decision, you would have no recourse at all.
Minor nit-pick: I don't think the story is a good example of your concept here. The radio telescope, regardless of what it did for scientists, served fewer people than what commercial use of channel 37 would have.
...because the results of science never end up benefit normal people? Science is forever whereas a television broadcast is temporary.
Why couldn’t they use one of the other channels? Was there no demand for such programming? Who was denying those options, if anybody?
The fun part about this is that McVittie, who helped to set the wheels in motion for the blanket ban of channel 37 in the U.S., never learned exactly why the FCC made the decision to flip its mindset on this issue.
Racism? Against Latinos in 1963? Nah, couldn't be.
And from Universe Today:
> If Channel 37 were ever lost to TV, the gap would mean a loss of information about the distribution of cosmic rays in the Milky Way galaxy and rapidly rotating stars called pulsars created in the wake of supernovae. Closer to home, observations in the 608-614 MHz band allow astronomers track bursts of radio energy produced by particles blasted out by solar flares traveling through the sun’s outer atmosphere. Some of these can have powerful effects on Earth. No wonder astronomers want to keep this slice of the electromagnetic spectrum quiet. For more details on how useful this sliver is to radio astronomy, click HERE.
Originally the allocation may have been for that site. That doesn’t really matter.