Re: A Belated Critique of Jerry’s Commons Paper

Steve_R — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:49:13 -0000

Since I view the spectrum as property held by the government as a public trust for the American people, I may be a little slow concerning privatization of the spectrum.

Well, here goes. In the "traditional" hard-core property model, the land owner owns all the property rights to his/her land. What that means is that they would own the spectrum too. So "selling" (privatizing) the spectrum in favor of those who would use the spectrum would be "stealing" one of the landowners property rights. How is this property "theft" legitimized?

As correctly discussed, RF does not recognize property lines and any privatization scheme would require oversight. Based on what I have read on TLF, the mantra is less government. So how would the oversight occur?

My prediction, (assuming privatization) is that the users of the spectrum would formulate their own industry association as a private "FCC". Unlike the government FCC which, in theory, makes decisions based on the "public trust", a private FCC would not be so constrained. Which leaves me with the following question, would the private FCC simply be a lackey of the big spectrum owners who would use their "power" to squeeze the smaller owners out of existence?

Also with privatization, how would a citizen continue to have an ability to use WiFi in their own home LANs??? The spectrum debate, on this forum, has been regretfully silent on this issue. This looks like the implications of privatization are not being fully disclosed. Currently, WiFi is free for home LAN use, with privatization we could find that we are now obligated to pay a rental fee for a formerly free resource?

I don't think that there is a rationale economic argument that by merely "owning space" that one is entitled to exact a rent. I will agree that if a company is providing a service to customers that they are entitled to derive revenue from that service.

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Re: A Belated Critique of Jerry’s Commons Paper