Commons spectrum isn't like a park!

Kevin "Former Counsel for New Technology Policy at the FCC" Werbach: this isn't about Karl Marx versus Ayn Rand, it's about the real world. Property is presented as the default regime, with the commons as a kind of public park. If that makes sense, then why hasn't a manufacturer bought some spectrum and done this? Why aren't there any real analogies in the real world (Ed: Amen!) (Ed: There's plenty of evidence cough WiFi cough that commons works, OTOH). The problem is that you need to pay up front for the spectrum -- a TV broadcaster can decide how much it's worth to sell spectrum to a cellular carrier. But you can't predict beforehand how much commons spectrum will be worth -- before WiFi came along, 2.4GHz was called the junk-band, yet, in a dismal tech economy, it's exploded, become more valuable that it would have been for exclusive use.

Commons spectrum isn't like a park. You do stuff in the park that you don't do in private spaces. But you use WiFi to compete with licensed spectrum users.

Property advocates view scarcity in a static way: spectrum is either not being used or being used in a low-value way. The value depends on the technical architecture of the system -- a function of the architectural system and the choice of regime influences the architecture. We might have unlimited bandwidth in a commons. Property regimes do not create the same incentives to interoperate and recover from interference that a commons use does (Ed: Hallelujah!).

Why doesn't the Internet collapse? Because we all have an incentive not to go to court when someone's packets interfere with ours -- it interprets it as damage and routes around it (Quick glance around by John "I coined that phrase and disagree with you" Gilmore, who is grinning wryly). Discuss