Liberty in Cyberspace

Abstract

l uring his recent tenure as Chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications I^Commission (FCC), William Kennard attempted to license low-power FM radio stations. Doing so, he believed, would increase competition and diversity in speech by enabling local community organizations such as churches, schools, and community groups to broadcast in a limited radius. FCC technical staff determined that the new radio stations would not result in any technical interference with any existing radio stations. FM station owners complained to the FCC, but when the FCC concluded that they had no case, the stations turned to Congress. Armed with substantial campaign contributions, broadcasters succeeded in getting Congress to pass a law restricting low-power stations. The large FM stations succeeded in protecting themselves from competition via legislation that silenced other speakers. Lawrence Lessig tells this story in The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in the Connected World in order to illustrate one of the ways that business interests determine how citizens can use resources that should be held in common for all citizens-in this case radio spectrum. Lessig argues that the Internet should be regarded as a resource held in common in the same way that radio spectrum, national parks, language, public streets, and writings in the public domain are held in common. The shared feature of each of these commons' is that no one has the exclusive right to choose whether and how others use the resource. No one, in other words, has the ability to exercise a property right regarding these common resources. Society must ask which resources should be regarded as commons, and then determine how the use of those commons should be regulated.