Commons v. Private Property in spectrum

This is an interesting panel sponsored by The Progress & Freedom Foundation. The crux is an important debate over whether wireless spectrum should be treated as government owned and controlled commons, as Larry Lessig argues for, or parcelled out as private property, as Duke University Law Professor Stuart Benjamin will argue on this panel and has argued in the paper linked below. Count me as an advocate for the private property approach. Excerpt from the panel gives a good overview:

WASHINGTON, D.C. - In the fast-changing world of wireless communications, a current enthusiasm of some big-name legal scholars is the creation by government of a ‘commons' through which people transmit on open radio spectrum. But Duke University Law Professor Stuart Benjamin, who is not unenthused about the prospect of umpteen wireless users communicating in self-perpetuating ‘abundant networks', thinks private control of spectrum is better. He and a panel of experts debate public versus private spectrum control at an April 15 Congressional Seminar sponsored by The Progress & Freedom Foundation.

“There has been much ferment recently in the world of wireless communications,” Benjamin writes in a paper released by the Foundation, “Does Spectrum Abundance Justify Public Control?” Commons advocates “contend that we can now have wireless networks in which each new device also creates new capacity, such that a wireless network can add users without creating interference.” Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig and other advocates “contend that a new paradigm is now technologically possible, in which an effectively infinite number of users can communicate without interfering with one another,” he writes. In fact, they “argue that these abundant networks will not arise if private parties obtain property rights in spectrum.

“My answer is that the possibility of abundant networks calls into question one aspect of the government's allotment of spectrum – namely, the division of spectrum into small parcels – but it does not cast doubt on the efficiency of private ownership. If spectrum is allotted in large swaths, there is every reason to expect that private owners will create abundant networks (assuming of course, that these networks work as promised),” Benjamin concludes.