Umm, the "free" in the article refers to freeing the big telecom companies from providing a useful public service with their so-called license of the public's airwaves. The odds of a company "freeing" spectrum they just spent billions on are pretty slim.

And here I was thinking Michael Powell had finally done something I could agree with. Sigh ...

I would say the last time the FCC opened up some spectrum, we got 802.11a, since AFAIK the U-NII band is the most recently created open spectrum.

Random trivia: Apple was one of the biggest lobbying forces behind creation of the U-NII band.

The important thing is that the spectrum will be there when the standards for the cortical implant interchange protocol get finalized.

Noosphere now!

"The last time the FCC opened up some spectrum, we got WiFi."

That's rewriting history somewhat. The Industrial/Scientific/Medical (ISM) unlicensed bands including 2.4 GHz were allocated by the FCC in 1985. The IEEE 802.11 standards which are the basis for WiFi weren't finalized until 1999, which is 14 years later. So it's not quite true that WiFi rushed to fill some newly opened spectrum. The ISM bands were around for a long time and used for many other purposes before WiFi came along.