What possible legal right did the government have to make such a requirement? You can make your own assumptions.
Well, despite what the TV networks want us to believe, the government does control the spectrum on our behalf. Going digital allows for better coverage in that the signal is all or nothing in better quality--no more fuzzy, vague signal that you can't understand--but at the expense of redrawing the coverage map. It also allows for many more stations broadcast (free) on sub-channels, without allocating more spectrum. And it allows us to allocate spectrum where it's being used, wireless and cellular--I don't/won't use a cellphone, but even I realize that it's better for the economy to let people communicate than watch "Gossip Girl."
Also, fingers crossed, the FCC is looking this year at stealing back some high-quality spectrum for unregulated use, which startups will love.
The big problem is the archaic auction system, for the most part, granting monopolies to enormous blocks of the spectrum to raise a few bucks and leaving the crumbs for the population. When it cost millions of dollars to broadcast something, that made sense. Today, when it costs less than a thousand and we have the ability to filter ("switch," as the WiFi people put it) between multiple users on the same frequency...?
Anyway...
After talking to many industry people over the years, there are two real-world pressures to push for "the cloud."
The first is that Microsoft and the PC manufacturers both did a wonderful job turning each other's products into a commodity. Because Microsoft did a great job (despite the complaints we all have) with DOS and then Windows, nobody cares what computer we buy. And because computer manufacturers have been so good at keeping to standards, we don't much care what
software we buy, either. Great for us, but it means that you can only compete on price, for the most part, in these industries.
And the upshot is that, when you buy a four hundred dollar laptop, you're buying something that cost very nearly four hundred dollars to manufacture and distribute. Therefore, we have the marketing of "the Post-PC era." You don't
really want a full computer. You want a phone. No? OK, a tablet. No? Would you believe glasses? Because of the incompatibilities and lockdowns, the markup on those devices is much higher, as you can see with the prices on the nearly-identical Chinese knockoff tablets that cost nothing.
The second pressure is that selling software isn't the business it used to be. When a new version of Microsoft Office came out, years ago, every office bought it, and about half the home computer users did, too, because it had useful new features. There were also droves of new computer users every day, also driving sales. Today, the old version is good enough, and LibreOffice is nearly so. The same goes for any package, they're about as good as it's convenient to get them, and the Open Source packages are catching up; likewise, the PC market has come close to saturating, new sales being for kids with no money. That makes for choppy, unpredictable,
declining sales.
However, if you can convince everybody to view software as a
service, you can charge a subscription and "make everybody happy," while making the revenue numbers entirely predictable and (with some vendor lock-in) foolproof.
I was told fifteen years ago (by friends there) that Microsoft was looking to shift everything to subscriptions for this reason. It was phrased to me as "they'll roll it out as soon as marketing can explain it in a way that doesn't make the development team laugh at them."
Now there's the third pressure, though, which is that, if you're working off of a server, you're being monitored by that server. It's a perfectly responsible thing to do, obviously, to make sure nobody breaks your expensive machines. But since there's no real privacy law, and the analysis of that monitoring is an extremely valuable product, you have even more reason to push people onto "the cloud."
But don't panic too much. The computer industry lurches back and forth like a drunk, usually in about fifteen year cycles, from what I can tell. Today, we have the cloud. In the mid-'90s, we had the push for "pervasive computing," the idea that your refrigerator, shoes, books, and mirrors would somehow have computers in them, communicating with each other. Early '80s, we did all the real work through "thin clients," which implies an enormous server out there. Before that? Mainframes, where I should add, you paid to use based on the
time you used it. So it's not a new model.
Between those beats, though, you also see the trend of decentralization. If you look at the advances in desktop computers, "fat clients," and privacy, they mostly happened right in the middle of the pushes for centralization. So I suspect that, as Chaard mentioned, we'll see a lot of companies try to push to subscription models, but a lot of them'll fail in the face of competitors who say, "you own 100% of your computer/car/towel."
Then we can regroup in 2028 for the same conversation...
