Technology Meets Bureaucracy

For John, BLUF:  Federal liscensing and Bureaucracy held up cell phone introduction a couple of decades.  Did you miss them?  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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We Could Have Had Cell Phones 40 Years Earlier

Here is the sub-headline:

This technology was intentionally prevented from getting off the ground for decades.

From Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), by Mr Thomas W. Hazlett, 20 June 2017 .

Here is the lede plus one:

The basic idea of the cellphone was introduced to the public in 1945 – not in Popular Mechanics or Science, but in the down-home Saturday Evening Post.  Millions of citizens would soon be using "handie-talkies," declared J.K. Jett, the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  Licenses would have to be issued, but that process "won't be difficult."  The revolutionary technology, Jett promised in the story, would be formulated within months.

But permission to deploy it would not.  The government would not allocate spectrum to realize the engineers' vision of "cellular radio" until 1982, and licenses authorizing the service would not be fully distributed for another seven years.  That's one heck of a bureaucratic delay.

Note this is about the cell phone as phone, and not your smart phone, as hand held computer.

Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but this bureaucratic delay, this imposition of regulation, is probably happening today, with one or more other technologies.

Regards  —  Cliff