That always felt like a dubious standard. Parkland is a public good, but the Supreme Court would insta-smackdown any FD-style restriction on political speech in parks.

The nature of each "public good" could be evaluated to determine what was appropriate to ensure all citizens equal access to a public good.

FD just required a media outlet to make sure the media basically gave another candidate the opportunity to access, it didn't actually require equal time, not unless that candidate wanted to, or in the case of advertisements was willing to buy them.

Certainly parkland should be equally available to members of different political parties, but it's not like you have to use the same standard either: the nature of a "public good" would determine the nature of what fair equal access meant. For airwaves it's one thing. For a limited physical resource it's another.

Parkland is a limited physical resource.

So is radio spectrum. Regardless, as I said, you determine for each "public good" what appropriate fairness means. You don't back down from it just because doing the right thing isn't as easy as doing the easy thing.

Right, so you haven't identified what's different about one that makes the FD the right answer in one case.

But limited in a different way than radio spectrum.

What's the reasoning for the distinction? How is spectrum over the air a public good but spectrum over wires not?

The broadcast spectrum is considered a limited-supply public property, so the FCC (or other national equivalents) issues licenses allowing organizations (or standards) to use parts of it.

Wires are not limited supply in any meaningful sense (just install more), and in many parts of the world, not even public property.

You must cross public property ie roads to install a large scale wired network. That said, it’s a difference in scale creating a difference in kind.

The involves being granted easements, which are also not a limited public good in the general case.

> just install more

It's so hard to take that seriously (e.g., exactly how many sets of cables per home is reasonable? and how often can people be expected to change them?), but even if I somehow do:

How is that different from, say, electric power, as far as constitutionality goes? We have the Federal (Water) Powers Act, FERC, etc. that regulate power distribution (among other things). I would've thought these are all easy to constitutionally justify the regulation of based on other clauses (like the Commerce Clause).

"more" in this context can mean "reach more locations" or "increase the bandwidth to existing locations". I'm not aware of bandwidth issues requiring much more than an update maybe once in 50-100 years. For example, where I live in rural NM, the houses around here presumably got paired telephone wires on the order of 50-100 years ago, and then within the last 10-15 years they got rewired with multi-twisted-pair cables that easily get to 50Mbps. While in 80 years that might not be considered sufficient, I doubt anyone will seriously suggest another round of recabling within that time frame.

But anyway, you really seem to be missing the fundamental point here: there is no limited "spectrum" for wiring in the sense of multiple possible parties who want to use "parts of it" for various purposes. If you assign the XMHz to YMHz band of the electromagnetic spectrum to some purpose, it's gone, it cannot be used for anything else, by anyone else, across a potentially vast geographic area. There's no equivalent for this in the context of digital (or analog) data moving down wires.

Yeah exactly. We might not have had Rush Limbaugh in the mid-90s, but we still would have had Fox News or whatever.