Right now, as you read this, the air around you is thick with invisible conversations. Your phone is whispering to your router, your wireless headphones are singing to your laptop, and the smartwatch on your wrist is syncing quietly in the background.
We take this symphonic digital ecosystem completely for granted. But this panoply of wireless magic wasn’t just an inevitable product of technological march. It exists because of a profound, remarkably philosophical decision made by a bureaucracy in 1985.
It traces back to a seemingly mundane piece of regulatory code: the Federal Communications Commission’s Part 15 rules.
Historically, the airwaves were treated like highly exclusive real estate. If you wanted to broadcast a signal, you needed a license, a specific frequency, and a strict, government-approved mandate for what you were doing.
But within the radio spectrum, there were segments known as the ISM bands (Industrial, Scientific, and Medical). These were essentially the “garbage bands” of the airwaves. Microwave ovens, for instance, operated here, blasting out radio noise at 2.4 GHz. The interference was so heavy that the spectrum was considered practically useless for traditional communications.
Enter an FCC engineer named Michael Marcus. Marcus possessed a visionary understanding of a World War II-era technology called “spread spectrum” (famously co-invented by actress Hedy Lamarr). Spread spectrum didn’t rely on a single, clean channel; instead, it scattered a signal across a wide swath of frequencies, easily dodging interference.
Marcus argued for something radical: what if we opened up these “junk” bands to the public, allowing anyone to use spread-spectrum devices without asking for a license, so long as they adhered to basic power limits and didn’t cause harmful interference to primary users?
Incumbents fought it bitterly. Broadcasters and traditional telecommunications companies warned of absolute chaos. But in 1985, the FCC adopted the new Part 15 rules.
“We often talk about the great technological breakthroughs of our time as hardware or software triumphs. But sometimes, the most important enabling technology is just a clearing in the woods.”
Think about the nature of most regulation. It usually prescribes behavior. It looks at the future and says, “You may do exactly X, under condition Y.” But the Part 15 ruling did the opposite. It created a sandbox. The FCC didn’t try to predict Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cordless phones, baby monitors, or the Internet of Things. In fact, they couldn’t have. They simply set the structural ground rules for how devices should coexist without stepping on each other’s toes, and then they stepped back.
This is the beauty of permissionless innovation. When you don’t have to ask a gatekeeper for access, a massive, uncoordinated burst of creativity happens.
A small company in the Netherlands could start working on what would eventually become Wi-Fi. Ericsson could invent Bluetooth. Innovators didn’t need to petition the government to launch a new product; the space was already cleared for them to play.
Part 15 was an admission of humility by a regulatory body—an acknowledgment that the most profound inventions are the ones we cannot yet foresee.
The greatest legacy of Part 15 isn’t Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. It is the enduring lesson that when you give brilliant minds a blank canvas and the freedom to experiment without asking permission, they will build a world more connected than you ever dared to imagine.
Note: this post was triggered by my reading of David Pogue’s new book Apple: The First 50 Years in which he describes the development of the Apple III and how its design met the requirements of the FCC’s Part 15 in terms of reduced RF interference.
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