Not entirely true, there had been licensing fees for a long time. The auction thing had the FCC seeing big buck and they started doing the whole auction thing.
Licensing fees were there for a while, then went away, then came back as annual regulatory fees. The whole fee structure was thrown out for a while. IIRC - and I may not - there was some court case over the fees claiming they weren't fair and bore no relation to the amount of regulation required.
They came back as "annual regulatory fees".
The application fees (as opposed to the annual license/regulatory fees) were somewhat higher and were based on the amount of work necessary to process an application. That was just the FCC fees - engineering and legal to prepare the applications were higher.
Auction is a different animal. IIRC, and again, I may be wrong as it's been a number of years, anyone who had licenses for spectrum prior to the auction was grandfathered into the spectrum they had with no auction fees. That included TV, Radio, land mobile, marine, and telco. New allocations were auctioned off to highest bidder.
But the $$/Mhz is much lower for broadcaster. Telcos pay as much or more for small blocks of spectrum while broadcasters, especially TV get huge chunks. The exchange you mentioned before was hardly fair at all. The TV guys got way more spectrum for their narrower band stuff.
Are you talking auctions or annual license/regulatory fees? For auction, it's simply market: companies are willing to bid more for their spectrum than TV. I'll agree that it's an imperfect marketplace as broadcast spectrum can't be used for telco and telco can't be used for high-power broadcasting, but within each allocation the market value is determined by auction: and that is the fairest and best way to determine market value.
Now, if we were to throw out both the international and domestic allocations process (and I've been deeply involved in both in my former life), then everyone could bid for any piece of spectrum.
I can sorta agree with that except that the FCC has taken on this whole license for MTA or BTA concept. The broadcasters also have to have coverage of those areas. Considering the cost to deploy coverage too the telco are really getting raked.
But that's not exactly the case. Some broadcast allocations serve only small portions of a BTA or MTA. Others serve the whole thing. On the TV side, an LPTV facility might only serve 100 square miles... while a full power station gives a radius of 50-75 miles or more. FM has about 7 classes of station (plus the low power stuff) that cover radii of 28 km up to 92 km... in the non-commercial segment, it's like the AM band - you can cover as much as you want without interfering with someone else.... up to that 92 km protected area (the radii are over a flat earth - terrain factors into the coverage).
The crux is this: a broadcaster may not cover an entire MTA or BTA. It's really a different animal.
The telco side makes much more efficient use of the spectrum in terms of number of signals within the MTA/BTA, while the broadcaster is less efficient in terms of number of signals. In terms of simultaneous "users" (listeners/viewers), broadcast used to have the edge - I'm certain in most areas that telco does now. Heck, most of the TV delivery is through cable systems as opposed to over-the-air (which is why the DTV conversion was not a bigger CF than it was).
Were we to reallocate the spectrum now, I think a good case could be made for eliminating much of the TV broadcast spectrum and letting folks that want to watch TV do so via cable/satellite. The government certainly would be richer.
I am not sure when it started but I'll bet it is related to the communcations act of the 1936. All spectrum is government owned. International treaties cover how it will be used and managed. The ITU is part of the UN and I know that Department of Commerce and the DOD have a lot of say in how we in the US do things. Of course the FCC was given regulatory authority over the airwaves and the NTIA is the policy authority over US Spectrum. The US government has exercised its ownership of the airwaves in the past. In the 1940s ham radio was banned.
Damn Roosevelt.
(j/k)
As you know, I've been on negotiating teams at ITU, and supported some of the WARC efforts. DOC (NTIA) manages the non-mil governmental allocations and makes recommendations to both the Mil and FCC with regard to their regulatory/use environment. FCC has regulatory authority over the private spectrum - NTIA and the Pentagon regulate the military & government spectrum (for example, all FAA facilities are allocated through NTIA and the FAA frequency office - but FCC licenses aircraft). NTIA does set national telecom/radio policy. (Side note: I ran across Larry Irving recently in an electronics store and had a nice, but short, conversation).
I think that changed with the involvement of the DoD. They have reserved authority to boot everyone off of the air if they need the airwaves.
That's not quite the case, but in practice that's what happens. The Act provides for various agencies to set rules - and there is statutory authority to order licensees off the air in times of national emergency. Technically the way it works is that the executive branch invokes that authority and the FCC actually executes the orders with licensees.
During your aforementioned WWII ham silence, it was the FCC that actually enforced the silence - and it was during that time that many of the FCC monitoring stations were established.
The original radio acts were established to support SOLAS because the bedlam of unregulated spectrum was causing a problem with respect to ship distress calls. The whole thing was revamped in 1934 as part of the original telecom act - which established the FCC and removed radio regulation from the Commerce Department.
That still didn't convey "ownership" of the spectrum to the government, it established a licensing process for licenses to use. That's part of the reason that the government didn't start selling spectrum until the '90's in the auction process - when they realized that licenses had become essentially "expectations of renewal" and those licenses could be sold for a lot of money. I spent some time representing clients at the FCC in the process that established the auction process.
).
