Ever since Marconi sent his first radio signal from one side of an Italian hill to the other back in 1895, and particularly since the establishment of the Federal Communications Commission back in 1934, the airwaves have been considered public property. The award of licenses to use this commonly held resource is long, tedious, sometimes political, but at least the public has some control over how broadcast spectrum is used and who profits from it.

That may be about to change, in a way that now seems small but that soon could become profound. The FCC is developing plans to treat the airwaves as nothing more than one more commodity to be bought and sold on the open market, with private profit replacing public benefit as the driving force.

The FCC last week created a new class of licenses called “guard band managers.” The primary purpose, as the name suggests, is to protect public-safety communications from interference by commercial activities going on in neighboring spectrum bands. With the explosion of wireless communications — cellular telephone, pagers and Internet — this enhanced protection for police, fire, ambulance and other public-safety services is essential.

Not so essential is an accompanying component of this guard band project. The holders of these new commercial licenses, the managers, will be able to subdivide the spectrum they buy at FCC auction and lease it for profit to third parties, with no government oversight or public input.

If the airwaves were as unlimited as the word “airwaves” suggests, this would not be a problem. But they are not unlimited — which, after all, is why public-safety communications need protection — and the public should be concerned about the diminishing control it has over how its property is used.

For decades, broadcast licenses were free, the applicant merely had to demonstrate that the particular band of spectrum would be used responsibly and with some degree of public benefit. License fees followed, modest compared to the potential profits, but still public interest was a significant factor in the award of a license and public comment on how well its had been served was a key element of license renewal.

Now, with Congress needing to balance the budget and needling the FCC about delays in license and merger approvals, broadcast licenses are auctioned, virtually no questions asked, to the highest bidder and the tens of millions generated by these auctions have become a small but not insignificant tributary of the federal revenue stream. This high-priced consolidation has had an unfortunate and undemocratic effect on the marketplace of ideas and threatens to turn the public from a participant into little more than an audience.

This proposal comes at a time when burgeoning demand for broadcast frequency is a problem, but it also comes at a time when technological solutions are being developed. For example, software defined radio uses chips instead of tuners and will allow broadcasters and listeners to automatically skip around the spectrum to frequencies not in use at the time. As technologies such as this are refined, they will do much to permanently relieve the current congestion in wireless communications and to reopen public access to its property. The FCC’s leasing proposal subdivides this property without the owner’s consent.