Spectrum wants to be Free!

In the winter of 2000, I came down to Fairfax to do an "externship" at AMS during what MIT calls its Independent Activities Period (or IAP for short).  While I was there, I ran into a guy who wrote a paper in his undergraduate time at MIT about sharing spectrum - ultimately arguing that nothing should be licensed and we'd be much better off with freeing spectrum.  Then, yesterday, I ran across this article in the NY Times that is essentially talking about doing something similar, but in a much orderly fashion, involving registration, but sharing a lot of government spectrum.  If this all pans out - it would free up an amazing amount of spectrum and free up a lot of data bandwidth.