Yes.

And in the United States of America, at least: Radio transmissions are illegal by law, except where permission is granted by law.

(Try not to overthink it too much. A previous responder provided a citation that did not serve them well.

This situation can seem ugly or fantastic or jubilant or something else -- and it can be changed! -- but it still is just is how it is.)

Maybe I'm an asshole sometimes and legal restraint is what keeps me from mounting a bunch of microwave oven magnetrons on a tower and killing the 2.4GHz ISM band for miles in any direction, or re-tuning my FM transmitter to step all over the aviation band just for the lulz.

I can grow my own food. I can share it with my neighbors. In Ohio, at least, I can sell a ton of produce every day to random strangers at any price that we find to be mutually acceptable, and I can do this without any licensing, inspection, or sales tax burden.

But I don't grow much of my own food; I never wanted to grow up to be a farmer.

I mostly consume products of industrialized agriculture. The USDA, FDA, and FTC help to ensure that the national brands I buy from the grocery store contain what they say they do, and that they're safe to consume, and that I get something close to the amount of it that is printed on the label.

When I buy a 5-pound bag of wheat flour from the grocery store today it weighs in at right around 5 pounds and is made from wheat. Yeah, there's some stragglers from other plants in the process and a completely non-zero number of insect parts and stuff, but it's not like there's a special department that grows bugs just to throw them into the mix. The goal is to simply produce and deliver wheat flour.

There was a time when adulteration and substitution of food was common and deliberate. We used to bulk up flour using cheap minerals that we'd dig out of the ground that had zero nutrition, such as gypsum. This kind of thing serves as proof that companies are assholes when left to their own devices.

I guess we could go back to letting them do just fucking-whatever again, but do you really want to have to analyze all of the food that you buy in order to gain knowledge of what's actually in there? (How else would you be able to make an informed purchasing decision?)

Anyway, that sounds like a ton of work compared to paying a little extra to have other people do it for me, whereby I can just read the ingredients label and know with pretty good surety what's inside the bag.

I live in a society. I make money doing things that I'm good at doing, and I use this money to pay people to do stuff that they're good at doing -- and to make sure that they're doing it right.

Worse is the OEMs all gradually removing the ability to operate modems intended for general purpose devices as APs in the 5 GHz range. The trend is to lock the firmware to only reply as a client in those bands. Meanwhile it isn't uncommon to encounter cheap dedicated APs that operate under the incorrect regulatory domain for the country they're sold in. So the cure doesn't work yet we lose the ability for P2P outside of 2.4 GHz.

(If they happen to be reading I'd like to offer a hearty fuck you to whoever at Intel and Qualcomm initially decided on these absurd policies.)

Spectrum used to be a lot more limited when frequencies had to be exclusive and baked into hardware designs. Now we have agile radios that can tx/rx across wide bands and dodge other peoples' traffic, so the motivation for exclusivity is a lot weaker. If you walk around with a spectrum analyzer you will see traffic voting with its feet and overwhelmingly choosing the free-for-all ISM bands because dodging other peoples' packets is easy compared to obtaining spectrum licenses around the world.

So: the optimal regulatory approach changed, the laws didn't keep up, and now we have suboptimal regulation that isn't bad enough to spur a fix and vested interests (spectrum owners) who don't want it fixed so I expect it to continue for a very long time. So it goes. It's not great but if all the world's problems were as small as this one it would be a much nicer place.

My spark gap transmitter doesn't care about your spectrum. Regulation is important.