FCC: there they go again...

I'm a fan of wi-fi and believe unlicense spectrum has its place, but there is a tragedy-of-the-commons issue with allocating too much spectrum to unlicensed uses, and not allowing the property rights approach to prosper. What this comes down to is the FCC trying to pick winners by backing current technologies, but they have a poor track record of doing this and often the support for current technologies has come as a much larger cost of hampering future technologies. Thomas Hazlet waves the red flag in this piece in Barron's. Excerpt:

Take the TV band, encompassing more than twice the total bandwidth now allocated to wireless phone service, yet absurdly underutilized. Rather than auction liberal use rights for unoccupied TV channels, allowing rival technologies to compete, the commission staff is drafting rules that would permit only low-power devices -- like Wi-Fi.

The regulatory rationale: "The Commission's rules for unlicensed transmitters have been a tremendous success. [The experience] shows that there could be significant benefits to the economy, businesses and the general public in making additional spectrum available for unlicensed transmitters."

Wrong. More unlicensed spectrum may have value, even though unlicensed bands made available in the past decade have largely proven a bust, but the FCC central-planning mandate is not the way to gauge this complex economic evaluation.

Numerous providers of advanced technologies, from Qualcomm to ArrayComm to IP Wireless to Navini Networks, ache to provide wireless broadband to homes and businesses via licensed frequencies. Such valuable wide-area options, excluded by unlicensed rules, could be neatly deployed on exclusively assigned spectrum. Surfing today's Wi-Fi bubble, the Commission leaves tomorrow's promising wireless technologies on the beach.