[stjohnswarts]

Or we could just leave it alone and not worry about the demands of 0.000001% who want to accumulate yet more wealth at 0 benefit to society, unlike ham operators who can help during emergencies and natural disastors when all other means are down.

[livueta]

The point I'm trying to make is that hobbyists vs. .0001%ers is a false framing because less restrictive rules would benefit a much wider set of users than just HFTs. If you compare the degree of open-source project activity between ISM and HAM bands the difference is night and day. Stuffing all that vibrancy into a few narrow bands while HAM activity above HF is practically dead is the opposite of a public good.

Re disaster support: complete and utter LARP to an embarrassing degree. I've been familiar with a variety of clubs all my life through participating family members and this simply doesn't happen in a way that has any practical benefit to anyone. Again, opening it up would improve disaster comms quality by incentivizing development of better protocols and by getting access to those methods out of the hands of the unqualified gatekeepers of clubs.