TABLE OF CONTENTS In April of 1912, the great passenger linear Titanic glanced off an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Great Britain to the United States. The Titanic was equipped with the most advanced wireless communications available in its day, but so were many of the ships that plied the north Atlantic in those days. While cold winter weather, arrogance, optimistic planning, and a lost pair of binoculars were the proximate causes of the disaster, the lack of regulations regarding radio usage and interference avoidance made a contribution to its severity.
This much-publicized tragedy catalyzed the end of the anarchy in the use of wireless at sea and the beginning of regulation of broadcasting in general. In August of 1912, a US law gave the Secretary of Commerce the responsibility of administering licensing of radio stations within the United States. Broadcast radio in the United States arose around 1921, and the initial legal framework recognized de facto possession of spectrum as constituting a property right: the first broadcaster in any jurisdiction to broadcast in a given frequency band owned the spectrum they transmitted in. However, confusion and contrary court decisions caused this simple guideline to falter, leading to broadcast anarchy and interference with popular stations in major broadcast markets. In 1927, the US Congress passed the Radio Act, which established a Federal Radio Agency with responsibility for stewardship of spectrum; seven years later the Congress replaced the FRA with the Federal Communications Commission...
