I just read The Political Spectrum by Tom Hazlett, which took me back to my roots. Well over three decades ago, I was inspired by Technologies of Freedom by Ithiel de Sola Pool. He made the case both that great things were possible with tech, and that the FCC has mismanaged the spectrum. In grad school twenty years ago, I worked on FCC auctions, and saw mismanagement behind the scenes.
Allocation of a finite, limited resource like the electromagnetic spectrum made sense. However, other than allocating frequencies for wireless, FCC regulation of the internet itself makes no sense at all.
In a very pure sense, anything the FCC does that causes another to alter their communication is a form of censorship, no matter how slight. So yeah, dump the FCC. I was involved in this industry as a CFO and how long have they been talking about "Convergence"? Its a joke.
The aggregate amount of spectrum "auctioned" or given away to commercial interest is 5-10X more than most other developed countries. Our regulators and senators via revolving doors manipulate this market and use the peoples spectrum without any real oversight. Foreclosure value is real and most of it is not used as all most of the time. Not legal use, real use. The FCC is releasing more unlicensed which helps but we need to stop "giving" spectrum to big companies who figure out how to extort the tax they pay to government on the American people via expensive phone, tv, internet etc. every month with data caps, terrible coverage, less choice via consolidation etc. We need more real independent analysis on this subject, we need the truth.
If we take it as a given that it is in an organism's best interest to become the gatekeeper to a valuable resource that was formerly a commons, how should that inform meta-policy (mostly legal precedent and legal philosophy?)
Two examples of creative successful US spectrum policies that impacted the world:The 1970s "open skies" satellite policy that created the C band satellite constellation that then enabled CATV as a major industry and major new US program producers such as HBO and CNN.
1985 creation of unlicensed ISM bands that in turned spurred development of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
1987 FCC decision NOT to pick a 2G cellular standard like the rest of the world. This suppressed the commercialization of CDMA, the formation of Qualcomm, the the technology that became a key component of 3G around the world.
I can see three lessons to take from this. First, property does not exist as an objective reality independent of our definitions and empowerment of it, second, that regulation is used to define, order, regularize, and protect our notions of property as much as anything else, and third, that this definition supports the large scale and long term investment in developing such property. Markets in licenses may be an improvement, but there really isn't much difference between selling licenses and selling the owners of those licenses. The limitation of entry in new and reserved spectrum may have been unnecessary but would likely have to have been faced anyway due to limited spectrum frequencies.
I can understand you might have different ways you prefer to use these words, but it isn't "disingenuous" of me to use them differently, if I use them in common ways.
It is disingenuous to call what happened before 'rules' and what happened after 'regulations' to make your case, nor is common law the market, or not enforcing common law not the market. You have to ask why the court no longer saw property rights as sacrosanct and sided with government.
Hazlett’s Political Spectrum
Allocation of a finite, limited resource like the electromagnetic spectrum made sense. However, other than allocating frequencies for wireless, FCC regulation of the internet itself makes no sense at all.
In a very pure sense, anything the FCC does that causes another to alter their communication is a form of censorship, no matter how slight. So yeah, dump the FCC. I was involved in this industry as a CFO and how long have they been talking about "Convergence"? Its a joke.
The aggregate amount of spectrum "auctioned" or given away to commercial interest is 5-10X more than most other developed countries. Our regulators and senators via revolving doors manipulate this market and use the peoples spectrum without any real oversight. Foreclosure value is real and most of it is not used as all most of the time. Not legal use, real use. The FCC is releasing more unlicensed which helps but we need to stop "giving" spectrum to big companies who figure out how to extort the tax they pay to government on the American people via expensive phone, tv, internet etc. every month with data caps, terrible coverage, less choice via consolidation etc. We need more real independent analysis on this subject, we need the truth.
If we take it as a given that it is in an organism's best interest to become the gatekeeper to a valuable resource that was formerly a commons, how should that inform meta-policy (mostly legal precedent and legal philosophy?)
Two examples of creative successful US spectrum policies that impacted the world:The 1970s "open skies" satellite policy that created the C band satellite constellation that then enabled CATV as a major industry and major new US program producers such as HBO and CNN.
1985 creation of unlicensed ISM bands that in turned spurred development of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
1987 FCC decision NOT to pick a 2G cellular standard like the rest of the world. This suppressed the commercialization of CDMA, the formation of Qualcomm, the the technology that became a key component of 3G around the world.
I can see three lessons to take from this. First, property does not exist as an objective reality independent of our definitions and empowerment of it, second, that regulation is used to define, order, regularize, and protect our notions of property as much as anything else, and third, that this definition supports the large scale and long term investment in developing such property. Markets in licenses may be an improvement, but there really isn't much difference between selling licenses and selling the owners of those licenses. The limitation of entry in new and reserved spectrum may have been unnecessary but would likely have to have been faced anyway due to limited spectrum frequencies.
Maybe they prefer to use "disingenuous" differently, too.
I can understand you might have different ways you prefer to use these words, but it isn't "disingenuous" of me to use them differently, if I use them in common ways.
It is disingenuous to call what happened before 'rules' and what happened after 'regulations' to make your case, nor is common law the market, or not enforcing common law not the market. You have to ask why the court no longer saw property rights as sacrosanct and sided with government.