According to the Washington Post, the FCC seems finally to be coming around to the idea that the spectrum ought to be used for digital communication. In 2002, I wrote about the issue for TCS Daily and for the Liberty Fund site. The latter essay began,
Imagine what the Internet might do for you if high-speed access were available anywhere and everywhere. You could access the Internet in all of the rooms of your house, or in your yard, or in your car, or on the beach, as easily as listening to the radio today. Imagine that this connectivity is at broadband speed, meaning equal to or better than the download speeds of cable or digital subscriber lines (DSL). Now, imagine something else—this pervasive, high-speed Internet access available for a small monthly fee—or even for free.
I believe we would have arrived at this much faster had there been no FCC.
I’m not clear what you’re proposing as the counterfactual. State-level regulation? A no regulation system where people help themselves to probably overlapping frequencies (in that scenario for example I might broadcast noise on my competitor’s frequencies to ruin their service)? Or a system where all frequencies are privately owned and traded? But we still need someone to enforce those property rights. So I would just see that as a more limited, market oriented fcc.
I’m with Robert Easton here in not seeing how the preferred non-FCC alternative would work in practice, especially based on the actual history of telecommunications in the US, the economic and political power of the incumbent players, and the enthusiasm among many free-market advocates for a model of maximal private ownership of spectrum.
Absent Federal government intervention I can see at least three possible ways in which incumbents could and probably would squelch proposals like this: 1) Buy spectrum blocs in various regions and keep them idle solely for the purpose of making it difficult for new entrants to introduce a service usable on a universal bandwidth. 2) If a new entrant or group of entrants wants to use or buy spectrum for this purpose, assert broad claims of interference with spectrum owned by the incumbent and try to sue the upstarts into submission. 3) If a local, regional, or state government wishes to buy spectrum for public use and there are willing sellers, lobby the next higher level government to prohibit lower levels of government from doing this. (Some states have already prohibited cities from setting up their own public WiFi networks or alternative broadband networks, as a result of lobbying efforts by incumbent telecommunications providers.)
From reading the article, it appears that the FCC is proposing to reserve a swath of spectrum for open-access wifi use — just as they currently reserve swaths for CB radio and so forth. But of course, open access is not enough to create a wifi network; that requires physical capital. The article is unclear on who would provide that capital. In some places in the article, it sounds like the government might do it; in other places, it sounds like Google and others might provide it for free.
> Or a system where all frequencies are privately owned and traded?
That would be my preference.
> But we still need someone to enforce those property rights.
We already have a very well established system of private property, enforced by courts and law enforcement at various levels.
The details of owning frequencies in geographical areas would be fairly trivial to work out, and would fit well into the existing framework.