Freedom of the press is limited to those who own presses, AJ Liebling reminds us. It is with that and the recent shutdown of the Depot Town pirate radio station the Echo considers the rules for Low Power FM (LPFM) radio.

The arguments for radio licensing are based on a few precepts: that the airwaves belong to the public, that the airwaves are scarce, and that the government's restriction on who can broadcast protects the public good. While one of those precepts still may hold, the other two should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

That the airwaves belong to the public is a fine notion, and one that we support at the Echo, though we realize that it is only true in abstract. But if this is true, we must ask whether the current usage of the radio spectrum is in the public's interest.

On that, we should be clear that we do not mean the interest of the government, or in the interest of business in America. While business is inseparable from America's good health, the interests of the citizens must come first, and one of the most paramount interests is a vibrant, competitive marketplace of ideas. This is not opposed to business, especially small business, we take pains to point out, but it is to the interests of outsized profit that privateer our public airwaves.But we digress. The first of the two notions that should be swept away is the thought that not only are the airwaves scarce, but also that more utility cannot be derived from them. This was true when the regulatory structure of the airwaves was set. When Marconi first fired up the set, the ability to control broadcasts and the ability to process information as broadcast was not what it is today. But as transistors shaped FM, so have advances in both broadcasting and receiving technologies allowed us to move to the serious discussion of micro frequencies and data compression. There is no technological reason save convention to maintain our current bandwidth hierarchy, and this alone could increase the number of voices on the air by an exponential degree. Certainly, the FCC has not failed in recent memory to embrace new technology, such as HDTV, nor to avoid deregulation when it benefits those who profit the most.

Low Power FM was made illegal in 1978, at the instigation of National Public Radio (NPR) and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). Since then, most recently in 2000, attempts have been made at reform, though LPFM is still strongly opposed by both NPR and NAB.

The Depot Town Pirate Radio station is not qualified for LPFM status, though the owner has applied, because LPFM is limited only to educational non-profit entities (and safety or transportation services), according to the FCC site. This has limited the post-2000 growth in LPFM licenses largely to those granted for Christian broadcasting and repeater stations, which feature no local programming.

It is our opinion that this stands against the interests of the public and against the interests of democracy. Local voices covering local issues without having to answer to national masters is essential to an informed, active public, and the FCC regulations currently curtail this for no worthy reason. Some of us at the Echo would go so far as to say that the intentionally restrictive laws governing LPFM justify and predict the emergence of pirate stations in order to serve the public good, but we realize that we cannot endorse an illegal action such as unlicensed broadcasting, and thus we must implore the FCC to right the wrongs of its regulatory position. We ask that other members of the community when communicating with elected leaders to also take up this charge: The FCC is not serving us, and we are its masters. We demand accessible, accountable, local radio and LPFM is the way to achieve it.