FREEDOM TO CREATIVITY!

| What? | Why? | When? | Who? |

Ever since the early days of radio technology, the spectrum has been subject to government regulation and allocation, based on the premise that the spectrum was a scarce good and that allowing everyone to broadcast would create too much interference and technology would be of no use altogether. While this might have held true in the early days, when the technologically exploitable range was very small – between 3 and 30 MHz -, the technological development made that a rather questionable claim. And, yet the regulation, which BTW initially favored big technological oligopolies and later, with the rise of broadcasting, big massmedia incumbents, stifling technological innovation and amateur media creation, has held fast to the day present.

Not for the lack of protesting voices. In 1926 Bertolt Brecht wrote: "Radio is one sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organise its listeners as suppliers." And the desire to overturn the firm grip of state control and media hegemonies over production and distribution of information and, in turn, over the public life did not only vent itself in words. The history of radio is swarming with heroic illegal acts of radio activists going underground, taking it to sea, hitting the streets to get their voice out over their free/pirate/micro radio or street TV sets, to reclaim the spectrum. The development of communication technologies have made Brecht's wireless utopia possible. The technological development and increase in capacity of wireless networks, interlacing, digitization and whatnot, have made possible a much better maximization of spectrum use without interference than the fixed allocation system would allow.

Community wireless networks are a standing testimony to that. And yet imagine what could be achieved if the unlicensed part of the spectrum wasn't reduced to the microwave oven frequency? If free unlicensed use of the spectrum could extend to other frequencies? Frequencies better fit for long range transmissions? Better exploitable for creating larger networks? If we could shake off the hegemonies and migrate from one-to-many model of broadcasting to a many-to-many model of citizen access to radio waves? Imagine... Imagine the unimaginable. A true radio democracy.

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