Yet the broadcasting technology is obsolete, even the fancy digital stuff.
With modern technology anyone ought to be able to maintain a local radio or television station. The current monopolies of the radio spectrum are entirely artificial. Even supposedly "public" broadcasters like NPR or PBS are manipulated by big money interests. The cost of maintaining a license to broadcast in some narrow slice of the radio spectrum is high, radio spectrum that supposedly belongs to all of us.
We could build a system where anyone could purchase a smart transmitter and it would find an empty slot in the digital spectrum and broadcast so long as the electric bill was paid, or the solar and wind powered batteries had juice in them. If new low power users were requesting space, higher power users, the 50+ kilowatt Goliaths, would be required to scale down accordingly and gracefully to make room for them.
We could require 51% local content of all individual transmitters and enjoy broadcasters who truly represented democratic principals, not big money and connected politics.
The internet is almost like that, example being that here we are on democraticunderground.com. I've got a few of my own sites too, but there's still big boys like google and facebook shoving their weight around. The difference between the radio spectrum and the internet is that nobody can displace me here on the internet. In radioland I've seen stations assimilated by the Trump supporting Christian Evangelical Borg...
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