
Spectrum should be private property (2004) - nileshtrivedi
https://mises.org/library/spectrum-should-be-private-property-economics-history-and-future-wireless-technology
======
dalke
As I recall, one of the reason for declaring the airwaves to be public was to
prevent lawsuits.

If they are private, then I, as a landholder, want to control the airwave
rights on and though my land. Why should some broadcaster get to control it,
without paying financial compensation?

If the current public radio waves are declare private, why wouldn't there be
the same lawsuits again? Should a landowners have the right to run a mobile
phone jammer which doesn't not adversely affect radio use outside of the land?
If so, who else has that right? Would it be legal to advertise radio jammers -
something which is currently prohibited? Should it be legal?

~~~
nileshtrivedi
The article covers this issue in depth. It uses a modified version of the
homestead principle to define how legitimate property rights should be
_created_. It argues that courts had come up with a solution for this using
nothing more than the common law, and that's why the govt rushed to declare it
a public good.

~~~
dalke
If it did, I had and have a hard time understanding how.

I assume that's the part about 'homesteading', right? In the historical
context, that's when a European power uses military force to take over land
which was controlled by a native population, and re-purpose it to fit the
European, and predominately British, way of life. (We don't, for example, talk
about the Spanish homesteads in the American southwest.)

But here it's used with a specific libertarian definition, which I can't help
but think echos the historic meaning. Based on this essay, it's the process of
taking unowned land and assigning initial ownership. (I point to Iceland as an
example of what truly unowned land was like. Not the American historical
context.)

In this case, no, the essay didn't establish what it means by 'unowned'. It
asserts that we should view things as "spectrum". That's a specific philosophy
that was created by regulation. It's not a natural definition. Before we had
spectrum-based continuous-wave radio, we had spark-gap radio which generated
broad-band signals.

Over time, legislation banned these radios because, in modern terms, they are
noisy and interfere with the spectrum. The government could do that because
these are the public airwaves, under public control.

Take that away, and where do you reset? Why shouldn't the original uses be
allowed again, and what other historic uses did the government take away? I
don't know, but the fact that I can point to one suggests that there were
others.

Of course, viewing the topic through a post-regulation framework makes it
easier to justify a specific apportionment, just like how the historic
homesteaders used the simplicity imposed by government authority to justify
occupation of land that was in use by others.

Even that philosophy aside, no, it doesn't answer the question. I'll phrase it
a different way:

Can I buy radio silence for my land? (That is, I have my own radio telescope,
and want no artificial radio signals in a given frequency range with power
levels above a certain threshold.) If so, how? If not, why not?

~~~
nileshtrivedi
Quoting:

"Thus the Rothbardian concept is radically different from how we're used to
thinking about property. It is not a physical object, nor a rigidly defined
spatial boundary; it is "not in things as such," but an exclusive claim to the
use of a scarce resource, a claim to the means of human action."

"My land property isn't violated by radio transmissions crossing its borders,
nor by airplanes passing overhead, so long as neither one affects my use of my
land."

"If my neighbor drills for oil in his back yard and finds an untapped pool
that extends under my land, I have no claim to the oil, so long as his
drilling doesn't disrupt my use of my property. If I tap into that same oil
deposit, I am violating his property. But I can drill down into non-contiguous
deposits next to his and they become my property even if they extend beneath
his land."

So, it seems that according to this article, if you are the first one to use
the corresponding TAS (Time,Area,Spectrum) package, you get the property right
by Rothbardin's homestead principle - irrespective of who owns the land rights
for that area. If not, you can buy it from the person who own that by paying
his price. So, yes, you would be able to buy radio silence for your home.

~~~
dalke
But it's wrong.

As I recall, we had lawsuits based on the idea the radio waves were
interfering with "my land." I wish I could find that article I read.

> It is not a physical object

That was another objection of mine. An EM wave is as physical as you and I.
It's much more physical than, say, a copyright.

> my land

Yes, that's part of the libertarian world view. I live in Sweden, where "my
land" has a different meaning. I have the right of public access to most land,
and the joint responsibility to maintain it.

The libertarian world view, deriving as it does from the British context of
serfdom, has a different interpretation of exactly the same term.

> you can buy it from the person who own that by paying his price

Yes, the libertarian view is that all things can be resolved by a market.
However, you haven't told me what that process might be, only expressed a
belief that it can be solve.

We have real-world equivalents based on observatories for visible radiation
instead of radio. Consider the McDonald Observatory. There are laws in the 7
county area to prevent light from interfering with the observatory.

Do you propose that the better solution would have been to start a outside
lighting market, and have the observatory purchase the sky illumination
rights, instead of passing a law? That doesn't make sense, since it only takes
a few stubborn people to ruin the telescope, but it's the logical conclusion
from the argument presented in this essay.

The market for EM silence is far different than the market for

~~~
nileshtrivedi
> it only takes a few stubborn people

This applies to land as well. It only takes a few people to ruin a golf
course, or a highway we want to build if they commit trespass or refuse to
sell their land. Yet, we make it work by considering eminent domain (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain#United_States)
) which requires "public use" and "just compensation", and NOT by
appropriating ALL of the land EVERYWHERE for ALL TIMES.

As long as property rights enforcement is there, the number of lawsuits
shouldn't be a problem. If trespassing on land isn't a huge problem, why would
trespassing of spectrum be?

Your observatory example sounds like tragedy of the commons. The article has
this quote:

"The tragedy of the commons isn't a symptom of too much market; it is the
result rather of not enough private property. All allocation of scarce goods
will be most efficiently handled by the price system—so long as enforceable
property rights are well defined."

