Transcript syndication - Welcome to Kevin Werbach's Website

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Comments on
Property Papers
Kevin Werbach
Supernova Group LLC
Spectrum Policy: Property or Commons?
Stanford University
March 2003
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Where We Agree
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Current system is heavily flawed.
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Property and commons not mutually exclusive.
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Uncertainty = need room for experimentation
and reconfiguration.
Scarcity and transaction costs are deciding
factors between models.
Primacy
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Papers advocate property as the primary
regime, with commons inside it as parkland.
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Problems with the park concept.
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Hasn’t happened so far with flexible use auctions.
Insufficient incentives to pay present spectrum value
based on guesses about future commons uses.
E.g. value of 2.4 GHz “junk band”
Commons not just unlicensed or spread spectrum.
Parks are the Wrong Analogy
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Parks compete with development for land,
but not for the same use.
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More accurate analogies:
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Both spectrum models support similar services.
Each enables and precludes certain business models.
Parks vs. private nature preserves, forests, campgrounds.
Public highways vs. toll roads.
Linux vs. Windows.
In all cases, either commons is primary
or both have plenty of room.
Scarcity
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Papers treat spectrum as a fixed resource.
But... availability of spectrum is a function of
technical and business architectures.
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Unlimited bandwidth, in the fractal coastline sense.
May be locally unlimited (e.g. highways)
Property regime creates scarcity by foreclosing other
kinds of uses.
E.g., UWB requires a sufficiently wide band.
Easements must be big and solid enough
to be viable.
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Burden of proof on easement users.
Why not all commons and auction low-power wideband?
Transaction Costs
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Increase for property regimes as the
environment becomes more dynamic.
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Every degree of flexibility requires transactions.
Kwerel/Williams give examples of complexities that
are difficult to support even for the initial transition.
DTV transition had low transaction costs too.
Commons create incentives for realtime
decision-making by participants.
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For property, recourse is a transaction, vs. alternate
path (as with Internet routing)
Ex ante vs. route around damage transaction
A “failed” commons today may succeed tomorrow
with new technology.