Spectrum Auction

The FCC spectrum auction is over and the anti-collusion restrictions have been lifted. I’m not going to say anything about what my employer did–I of course was not involved in the auction at all and I don’t know anything about it beyond the public announcements. But I wonder about the whole auction concept in the first place.

Once upon a time, many towns in England had a commons, a shared space for all the inhabitants. The city in which I grew up, Cambridge, Massachusetts, still has a commons, although it is basically indistinguishable from a park. In the old commons, people were allowed to graze their cattle and otherwise use the land. Of course, as we all know commons are subject to tragedy as population grows. What actually happened to the commons in England, though, is that they were enclosed by wealthy land owners who discovered that they could make money raising sheep on what was formerly common land.

This process was described in a little old poem I’ve always been fond of: “They hang the man and flog the woman that steal the goose from off the common, but let the greater criminal loose who steals the common from the goose.”

Anyhow, why is the spectrum not being treated as a commons? In this day and age spectrum is valuable. Selling it as private property, as the FCC just did, does not maximize its value for society. Clearly spectrum requires rules of the road–it can not simply be left to anarchy. But why not simply rent it out for limited, renewable, periods of time? Why not require that low-power use of the spectrum be permitted? Turning it into private property, even at the prices that it drew, is basically giving it away when considered over a fifty year time frame. Why did we do it?