
If Darpa Has Its Way, AI Will Rule the Wireless Spectrum - sohkamyung
https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/if-darpa-has-its-way-ai-will-rule-the-wireless-spectrum
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wahern
I once got into a heated debate (well, maybe I was the only one getting
heated) at a school cocktail party with (IIRC) a former chief economist from
the FCC about spectrum auctioning.

TL;DR: there's a cadre of policymakers (current commissioner Ajit Pai among
them) who are dogmatic about applying Ronald Coase's famous 1959 article "The
Federal Communications Commission", which argued that a property-based market
pricing system was the most efficient way to allocate spectrum.

I tried to argue that the fundamental problem isn't allocation of spectrum per
se, but maximizing aggregate throughput. Yes, there's no disputing Coase's
argument if we stick to the premise of figuring out how best to subdivide and
distribute a finite set of spectral bands in a top-down fashion. But from a
theoretical technological perspective that context was nearly outdated by
1959. By the time of the conversation in 2010, OFDM and beam-forming were
standard, validating as a practical matter David Reed's argument that spectrum
efficiency (in terms of number of data channels and aggregate throughput) is
ultimately a matter of computational power and not primarily limited by
spectral interference per se. The better allocation policy, therefore, is to
rely more on open spectrum and let technology battle it out.

That's still a marked-based approach; indeed, it's _more_ market-based; it's
just not property-based. But he just wasn't having it.

This DARPA challenge is great, but there are policymakers, including
policymakers currently in charge of the FCC, who fundamentally disagree with
the approach. In their mind, the private owner of spectrum can be relied upon
to select the technology that makes maximum use of the spectrum. But this
completely ignores rent-seeking behavior. There is no _ideal_ allocation of
spectrum; it's all contingent on many different variables wrt to the path of
technological development, not to mention the basic fact that competition
isn't perfect.[1] Private owners of spectrum have an incentive to seek the
outcomes that maximize their profit even if it they result in less efficient
_usage_ of spectrum (e.g. less aggregate point-to-point bandwidth). This has
been proven empirically because until recently it was WiFi that was at the
leading edge of spectral efficiency as deployed, and it still would be were it
not for government regulatory policies that prevent WiFi and similar open
spectrum environments from scaling up.[2]

If we can't agree on the basic problem we're trying to solve, we won't be able
to agree on the solution.

[1] Importantly, Coase's argument is premised on perfect competition. Sadly,
some very influential academics and policymakers adamantly refuse to accept
that violating such a basic premise could potentially result in completely
different (i.e. very inefficient) outcomes. This is the epitome of dogmatic,
non-scientific thinking, but as it's based on a true _theoretical_ model it's
cloaked as a scientific, fact-based approach.

[2] Which is not to say that there isn't a role for gov't regulation. But many
regulations would be different if we went all in on open spectrum policy. If
I'm right then in the next few years WiFi or something similar will begin
pushing the envelope again, forcing telecom operators to continue competing
with open spectrum solutions; _or_ spectrum efficiency will plateau again and
data rates will slowly rise as spectrum owners pursue rent-seeking over
technological investment.

