There's a couple more arguments: Amateur radio has usually been sold to regulators as a way to encourage international goodwill. Setting up a private point to

There's a couple more arguments: Amateur radio has usually been sold to regulators as a way to encourage international goodwill. Setting up a private point to point link is inherently in opposition to public goodwill. Like the difference between zoning real estate for public park to increase public happiness, vs zoning private warehouse space; they can't coexist in the same location. The FCC provides elaborate services ... to SOME services. If you interfere with aviation navigation signals, ambulance dispatching, or megacorporation broadcasting they have in some cases visited with swat teams. If you have no borders and no categorization there can be no differential services. If some idiot decides to use the middle of the 80 meter ham radio band for broadcasting and spectrum enforcement is a free for all then nothing will work for anyone anymore. This was the justification for a TV broadcast license costing roughly 1e5 times as much as a ham radio license, which also makes problems. The real estate analogy is no zoning at all of any kind usually doesn't sell very well to endusers once its explained what will happen. No one likes excessive zoning regulation, but none at all is usually worse. We're exiting a local maxima of personal freedom and for most of the lifespan of the technology the idea of letting people say what they want on the radio is on the downswing along. The easiest way historically to deal with "this speech is not a hate crime if spoken in Morocco but is a hate crime to be heard in Germany" or similar was always to make encryption illegal thus abstract out the technology of radio. This also helps with espionage. If its illegal to send encrypted codes (internationally and locally), and you don't send any, its kinda hard to get prosecuted for sending CP or industrial secrets or hate speech or whatever.