When Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927, it was striving to curtail the chaos that had overtaken the American radio industry. An explosion of stations competing for limited space on the airwaves had created an unstable situation. It also sought to put controls on what could be broadcast, through granting licenses. However, despite bring greater regulation to the airwaves than the Radio Act of 1912, it did make the important step of declaring these airwaves a public resource, a commons, that one single entity could own and the government could only regulate in the public interest.
[...] The British Broadcasting Corporation became the sole legal radio provider in the country and British citizens paid 10 shillings a year to listen to the radio, which kept it commercial free.[4] The downside of this was it provided less choice. It made the BBC a common unifying cultural institution, and perhaps gave it the ability to produce highly original programming, but its radio division suffered. For instance, in the 1970s, the BBC was ranked at the bottom in surveys of music radio.[5] The Radio Act of 1927 tried to combine the best [...]
[...] Calls for regulation mounted from businesses concerned that airspace was not being used efficiently and from moralists who believed that radio broadcasts could corrupt the nation's morals. The 1927 Radio Act was meant to balance these concerns, creating a licensing system for frequencies, but which also acknowledged that the airwaves with part of the public commons and that no one could claim ownership to them.[3] This paved the way for possible censorship of radio broadcasts, and despite concerns this would be become commonplace, America suffered no crackdowns on radio stations as seen in other countries. [...]
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