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158   Street Crime Provides a Case 
      For Rationing Radio Channels
      The Washington Post  Saturday, July 5, 1969

     The radio communications spectrum is one of the most precious
natural resources of an industrial society.  Like other resources,
little attention is paid to its allocation until it comes close to
being used up.

     But the shortage of spectrum space is already curbing development
of many fruitful applications of electronic technology.

     The most serious pinch is probably in the area of automobile
radio-telephones, not only for private use but also, in some cities,
for routine police and fire protection services.  Effective provisions
for civil defense, riot control and other disasters are nowhere to be
found.

     Personal safety against crime is also very much a matter of
efficient communications.  Individual SOS transmitters and automatic
burglar alarms to call the police by radio could be mass produced
quite cheaply, if it were not for the shortage of channels.

     The pattern of thinking about the radio spectrum as a natural
resource that needs rational management is beginning to take hold.

     For decades, we have understood that complete personal freedom
would be chaos, and broadcasters have to be licensed to use a
particular frequency channel to the exclusion of all other citizens.
We are just beginning to realize that such a license amounts to a free
gift of a precious resource now approaching depletion.

     We need to establish better policies to be sure not only that the
spectrum is being used in an efficient manner, but also -- even more
important -- that the allocation of channels corresponds to some
definite social policy for adjusting the conflicting claims of
would-be users.

     The Rostow task force on communications policy devoted a chapter
to spectrum management, based largely on the technical work of the
Joint Technical Advisory Committee (JTAC) of the Electronic Engineers.
They re-echoed the argument that "every significant study of the
spectrum problem in the past several years has emphasized that the
Federal Government does not have adequate technical and economic
information on which to base valid judgments affecting allocation and
utilization of the spectrum".

     The Government is, nevertheless, making many thousands of
decisions every year, and it is making them on the basis of policies
designed to minimize the surface cost of regulation.  The JTAC report
estimates that this neglect actually costs from $5 billion to $15
billion a year in waste of the resource.

     In these circumstances, an open market based on fees for rental
of channels would seem to be an attractive approach to resource
allocation.

     The Rostow report points out, however, that the long-range impact
of this policy has not yet been sufficiently studied.  For example,
how would educational and other socially productive uses be
subsidized?

     Furthermore, we still lack the technical knowledge to describe
channel rights of users in adjacent territories or adjacent frequency
channels that we need to resolve conflicts between them in an
efficiently used system.  Nevertheless, the report recommended that
modest use fees would encourage economic allocation.

     These proposals have more technically complicated aspects than
can be discussed here.  The important point is the priority we should
attach to the exploration of these issues as some of the vital choices
among our paths to the future.
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