Quality of Service. Multiple engineer-months of field strength estimates and measurements and extensive deconfliction to provide reliable broadcast service mea

Quality of Service. Multiple engineer-months of field strength estimates and measurements and extensive deconfliction to provide reliable broadcast service mean the part 73 licensing process is very expensive, yet it results in broadcast services that generally work pretty well. Of course its extremely expensive to regulate that level of QoS. On the other hand, the Ham Radio licensing process is like: try not to hurt yourself or others, take responsibility for your actions by attaching your callsign (aka legal contact, if it comes to that) to every transmission, and we guarantee absolutely nothing although you folks are historically pretty resourceful LOL. Naturally that costs about $5 to regulate that level of QoS. Every other service is somewhere in between. Part 87 for aircraft comms is a bit on the expensive side and extensively monitored and interference complaints are very aggressively enforced at a financial loss to the FCC (but, hey, public safety, so its worth it), Part 95-D for CB is for all practical purposes unregulated and as you'd guess its both basically unusable for any purpose and is also free. Over a very short period of time its tempting to be the first guy to pay Part 97 prices for a license then cheat the system and operate Part 90 services or even Part 73 services on that $5 Part 97 license. Over the long period of time, regulation existed for a reason, the reason has not gone away, and the price and paperwork burden of a Part 97 license would naturally rise up to the existing Part 73 system plus an extra $5 to fund the legacy ham radio service such that its now a net loss to merge parts 73 and 97 services. The overall process is essentially a wealth transfer from those who are the last to give in and ruin the commons to those who are the first to ruin the commons, which is usually not seen as a regulatory win in a theoretical sense. As a thought experiment, imagine a world of highly limited internet bandwidth and no net neutrality resulting in massive tiers of bandwidth and billing, and the government proposed regulation that if you set a "I'm a 911 call" bit in your packet, that would be not billed "free" service. You know if they allowed encryption of "911 voice call traffic", that the usual suspects would be trading blueray ISO files by the dozen per month using torrent clients with the "I'm a 911 call" bit set such that the BW was free. I'm not sure that works in the sense of everyone playing along in a system. In the very old days of radio there was no regulation, as being proposed; it didn't work very well. The FCC wasn't invented just for fun. The FCC is kinda like the EPA, didn't need the EPA in 10000 BC, and the only rational way to get into a future scenario where the EPA is no longer needed seems to be to go back to the population and living conditions of 10000 BC... So I wouldn't bet on "lets just rm -Rf the entire FCC" being implemented any time soon.