There is active controversy, however, over exactly how much "hand shaking" protocol must be built in by the manufacturer and required by law. Reed believes that as more and more of radio's basic signal-processing functions are defined in software, rather than etched into hardware, radios will be able to adapt as conditions change, even after they are in use. Reed sees a world of "polite" radios that will negotiate new conversational protocols and ask for assistance from their radio peers.

Even with the FCC removed from the center of the system so that the "ends" can dynamically negotiate the most efficient connections, Reed sees a continuing role for government involvement: "The FCC should have a role in specifying the relevant science and technology research, through the NSF [National Science Foundation]. There may even be a role for centralized regulation, but it's got to focus on actual problems as they arise, not on theoretical fantasies based on projections from current technology limits."

It's clear in speaking with Reed that he's frustrated. He sees an economy that's ready to charge forward economically being held back by policies based on the state of the art when the Titanic sank. (That's literally the case: The government gave itself the right to license the airwaves in 1912 in response to the Titanic's inability to get a clear help signal out.) Key to the new generation, according to Reed, are software-defined radios. An SDR is smart precisely where current receivers are dumb. No matter how sophisticated and expensive the receiver in your living room is, once it locks on to a signal it knows how to do only one thing with the information it's receiving: treat it as data about how to create subtle variations in air pressure. An SDR, on the other hand, makes no such assumption. It is a computer and can thus treat incoming data any way it's programmed to. That includes simultaneously receiving two signals on separate frequencies from the same source, as demonstrated by Eric Blossom, an engineer on the GNU Radio project.

Of course, an SDR doesn't have to treat information as encoded sounds at all. For example, says Reed, "when a new Super-Frabjoulous Ultra-Definition TV network broadcasts its first signal, the first bits it will send would be a URL for a Web site that contains the software to receive and decode the signals on each kind of TV in the market."

But SDR addresses only one component. Reed sees innovation all across the spectrum, so to speak. He and his fellow technologist, Dewayne Hendricks, have been arguing for what they call "very wide band," a name designed to refer to a range of techniques of which "ultra-wide band" (UWB) is the most familiar. Ultra-wide band packs an enormous amount of information into very short bursts and transmits them across a wide range of frequencies: lots of colors, lots of information. Reed says: "The UWB currently proposed is a simple first step. UWB transceivers are simple and could be quite low-cost. And UWB can transmit an enormous amount of information in a very short burst -- for example, a whole DVD could be sent to your car from a drive-through, fast movie-takeout stand." Other very-wide-band techniques, not yet as well developed as UWB, spread energy more smoothly in time and, Reed believes, are more likely to be the basis of highly scalable networks.

Given Reed's End-to-End commitment, it should be clear that he's not interested in legislating against older technologies but in helping the market of users sort out the technology they want. "Our goal should be to enable a process that encourages the obsolescence of all current systems as quickly as economically practicable. That means that as fast as newer, better technology can be deployed to implement legacy functions, those legacy functions should go away due to competition." In other words, you'll be able to pick up NBC's "West Wing" signal on your current TV until so many people have switched to the new technology that broadcasters decide to abandon the current broadcast techniques. "People didn't have to be legislated into moving from the Apple II. They did it voluntarily because better technology emerged," Reed says.

But ultimately Reed isn't in this because he wants us to have better TVs or networked digital cameras. "Bad science is being used to make the oligarchic concentration of communications seem like a fact of the landscape." Opening the spectrum to all citizens would, according to him, be an epochal step in replacing the "not" with an "and" in Richard Stallman's famous phrase: "Free as in 'free speech,' not free as in 'free beer.' Says Reed: "We've gotten used to parceling out bits and talking about 'bandwidth.' Opening the spectrum would change all that."

But surely there must be some limit. "Actually, there isn't. Information isn't like a physical thing that has to have an outer limit even if we don't yet know what that limit is. Besides advances in compression, there's some astounding research that suggests that the informational capacity of systems can actually increase with the number of users." Reed is referring to work by researchers in the radio networking field, such as Tim Shepard and Greg Wornell of MIT, David Tse of UC-Berkeley, Jerry Foschini of Bell Labs, and many others, as well as work being carried out at MIT's Media Lab. If this research fulfills its promise, it's just one more way in which the metaphor of spectrum-as-resource fails and misdirects policy.

"The best science is often counterintuitive," says Reed. "And bad science always leads to bad policy."

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