[nucleardog]

It's just not realistic to enforce at scale.

As an example of this, look at the explosion of cheap handheld radios that can operate across all different parts of the spectrum flooding in from China, enforcement has been... more or less non-existent except in the most egregious of cases. Generally the range on these things is only a few miles, and trying to pinpoint a single intermittent transmission even if it's static within that few miles can be _extremely_ time consuming.

And we're talking about a very limited shared resource that we rely on for many aspects of day-to-day life.

Where it _is_ possible to enforce at scale is at importation/sale.

Yes, any random yahoo can get the parts to put together an illegal transmitter. But the scale of that problem is a hell of a lot different than a product being mass marketed online for $50 with no indication that it's illegal to operate.

The simple fact is if the market gets flooded with cheap devices that don't follow the spectrum allocations, large swathes of the spectrum will very quickly become useless. It's pretty a straightforward example of the tragedy of the commons.