At long last the evil giant has been felled. The International Telecommunications Union, at the World Aligned Radio Conference, has eliminated the Morse code requirement for Amateur radio access to the High-Frequency (short-wave) bands. Those opposed to the code requirement have long argued that the code requirement was a useless impediment, keeping thousands if not millions of otherwise perfectly qualified individuals off the HF bands, while those in favor of it have warned that eliminating it would result in the Amateur bands becoming more less the same thing as CB radio.
Obviously, these are both simplistic viewpoints. CW did help keep the riff-raff out. During the seemingly endless internet debates about the code requirement, opponents of the code tried to "prove" this was not true by pointing out real and imagined incidents of misbehavior by Extra Class licensees in the phone bands. By doing so, they demonstrated a mind-boggling inability to get the point. These were Extra Class ops who had abjured CW. If those trying to make this argument had been able to copy code (which of course they mostly couldn't), they would have seen that our CW ops are far and away the best-behaved members of the Amateur community (except maybe during contests and DX pileups). The intentional jamming and foul language common on today's phone bands are by and large missing from the CW segments. I think there is a direct relationship between this better behavior and character. By requiring new license candidates to learn CW, the FCC required them to demonstrate a COMMITMENT, something many seem to think grossly unfair in America's entitlement-driven society.
And, it wasn't much of a commitment. The requirement has stood for years at five words a minute. Many exam administrators allowed candidates to write down the copy as dot-and-dash combinations, then, after the tape had been played, gave them time to translate the dots and dashes into English. This required merely memorization of the unique dot-and-dash combinations that make up each character, not any real proficiency in Morse code. A few evenings spent memorization the dots and dashes was sufficient, instead of the the weeks or months of practice copying real code which were necessary for most individuals to get to fifteen or twenty words a minute. This has been going on for about three years now.
Which brings us to the pro-code argument that without CW the amateur bands will become lawless. Obviously, this has failed to happen with the greatly relaxed CW requirement in force for years. It's not likely to happen now.
The REAL problem with loosing the code requirement is that it robs Amateur radio of a great deal of its usefulness as a way to train new technicians. The best way to learn how radio works is to build and experiment. Building a digital HF SSB transceiver for your first homebrew project is almost as bad as learning to play a Brahms concerto for one's first piece on the piano. Simple transmitters are almost always CW transmitters. Well, the argument goes, today's technicians don't need to learn nuts and bolts radio, they need to learn about TECHNOLOGY.
What the hell? There are all sorts of ways to learn about computer programming. The only way to learn about radio communications is to DO them, and the Amateur service is intended to provide this training ground. Without it, there will still be plenty of people to write communications programs, but there will be precious few RF engineers and technicians to make radio communications with these programs possible.
And here you have the point of all the bombast above. Eliminating the code requirement probably does not mean much; but those who want to learn about radio, I mean really master radio communications, are impoverishing themselves if they don't spend a month or so learning code so they can more easily build their own experimental equipment. To extend our musical metaphor, it will be like learning to plunk out a few complete songs by ear instead of learning scales and arpeggios first. It may be fun for a while, but one's ability to really master the instrument will be limited in a very real way.