Spectrum regulation has taken a natural resource, the radio wave, and transformed it into a valuable commercial asset. The administrative process of managing the spectrum and the socio-political decisions of how frequencies are assigned have made the territory of radio analogous to that of land: it can be surveyed, mapped, bought and sold. This character of the spectrum as the real state of the Information Society has been the source of endless tensions and conflicts. Since spectrum regulations were first introduced a century ago, there has been a movement amongst activists, intellectuals and philosophers to see the radio as an extension of public space. Parallel, participatory models of spectrum usage have given us community television, pirate radio and citizen WiFi networks, each built on the notion of radio waves as a common good.
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