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The spectrum is a public good, and it is scarce. License fees benefit the public. Of course, content providers and infrastructure providers do not buy license

The spectrum is a public good, and it is scarce. License fees benefit the public. Of course, content providers and infrastructure providers do not buy licenses altruistically. I think we're seeing Facebook being willing to invest in tech and potentially license fees because the ROI of having Facebook in a village can be estimated and offering this hardware looks like a worthwhile investment. While this sounds like a cynical perspective, it is not. Suppose a typical company would analyze the ROI and conclude that if the payout doesn't happen in 2 years it is not worth it. Facebook may be considering a 10 year ROI and thus may be acting both selfishly and also taking on infrastructure risk that has suffered from market failure until 2016 since no providers of first world infrastructure have opted to invest. In a capitalist utopia, anything with positive ROI would receive investment, and all risks could be accurately hedged, allowing all available capital to be fully utilized.

paavokoya 10y ago
>In a capitalist utopia, anything with positive ROI would receive investment Yes. Including arbitrary licenses enforced by local governments to raise the barrier to entry and restrict interconnected innovation through forcing all players to route through a central (likely selfish) entity. This does not benefit the public.
- grandalf 10y ago
  > Yes. Including arbitrary licenses enforced by local governments Not sure how a corrupt government is part of your definition of a capitalist utopia. In my definition of a capitalist utopia, there exists the optimal amount of regulation to maximize long term welfare. This means no regulations that benefit the next 3 years at the expense of the future, and also none that benefit the next 20 at the expense of the longer-term future. Regulations that do exist are consistently enforced without corruption or bureaucratic waste. In our actual (non-utopian) system, most regulations have the side-effect of benefitting one constituency or interest group over another, or one relevant time-horizon over another (most are profoundly short-sighted). Also, in a capitalist utopia there would be administrative districts that would allow for various regulatory schemes to be tested and compared scientifically, so even if one local government did make the mistake of offering a state-sponsored monopoly, the mistake would quickly be realized and corrected.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    Optimizing social welfare (regardless of time window) through regulation isn't capitalism at all.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      It's American capitalism. We just lost our way. "Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can surely be ﬂourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged." - Adam Smith
      - grandalf 10y ago
        Exactly, just as democracy is a way to maximize the power of the average person, capitalism is a way to maximize her economic freedom.
    - grandalf 10y ago
      Admittedly since children cannot vote our government will always be biased toward the interests of adults and will operate on a time horizon that steals from the future to benefit the present. However in a utopian version, perhaps there would be some mechanism by which the longer-term interests of children could be represented democratically. I would also argue that in a capitalist utopia there would not be things that we typically call market failures, since institutions would emerge to solve the problems based on market incentives. Also, I'm not arguing that a capitalist utopia could exist, just that it is sometimes useful to offer contrast to the idea that big firms must somehow have an enlightened and altruistic vision in order to make investments like the one in the article. It could in fact just be the true north of the profit motive animating longer-term planning than we typically see (due to perverse incentives that focus most businesses on very short-term planning).
  - deleted 10y ago
- narrator 10y ago
  You are referring to license monopoly. There are actually three kinds of local monopolies: margin monopoly, limited-space monopoly and license monopoly. Von Mises does a very good survey of these types of monopolies, monopoly prices and the conditions under which each exists [1]. Von Mises is a very deep thinker on this topic from a classical liberal perspective. He does agree that monopolies exist, but takes care to define the conditions under which they can exist. If a government wants to provide the best competitive environment, there are steps that can be taken to mitigate monopoly conditions from arising. [1]. https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/764 https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/764
stjacobs 10y ago
, , El Daz,, rref b TV rrrTV, Rev, r
GregBuchholz 10y ago
>The spectrum is a public good, and it is scarce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband
- __jal 10y ago
  I assume that you consider the link to refute the 'scarce' part. It doesn't.
  - eatbitseveryday 10y ago
    It is often useful to support statements such as these.
    - Johnythree 10y ago
      A fellow by the name of Claude Shannon wrote a book about it. Ultra-Wideband doesn't create new bandwidth. It just re-uses the existing spectrum in a different way. And by raising the general background noise it steals bandwidth from all the other users, so everybody is worse off. Or to put it another way "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
      - GregBuchholz 10y ago
        Scarcity by itself doesn't seem a significant enough aspect to warrant the FCC regulation that we have though. Think of other scarce resources like platinum. If ultra-wide band (or similar) technology was used back in the 1920's, I don't think the push for regulation would have been as strong, since jamming / interference wouldn't have been a driver. I think we've got a technical solution to the original social problem, it is just that it arrived 100 years later. https://www.shoretel.com/history-federal-communications-commission-fcc https://www.shoretel.com/history-federal-communications-comm...
        grandalf 10y ago
        This is an interesting point. Using spread spectrum techniques would increase the cost of the radio hardware involved, and might hinder adoption. Also, there would need to be regulations on signal quality, since a bad citizen in a shared-spectrum scheme adversely impacts others.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

paavokoya 10y ago

>In a capitalist utopia, anything with positive ROI would receive investment Yes. Including arbitrary licenses enforced by local governments to raise the barrier to entry and restrict interconnected innovation through forcing all players to route through a central (likely selfish) entity. This does not benefit the public.

grandalf 10y ago
> Yes. Including arbitrary licenses enforced by local governments Not sure how a corrupt government is part of your definition of a capitalist utopia. In my definition of a capitalist utopia, there exists the optimal amount of regulation to maximize long term welfare. This means no regulations that benefit the next 3 years at the expense of the future, and also none that benefit the next 20 at the expense of the longer-term future. Regulations that do exist are consistently enforced without corruption or bureaucratic waste. In our actual (non-utopian) system, most regulations have the side-effect of benefitting one constituency or interest group over another, or one relevant time-horizon over another (most are profoundly short-sighted). Also, in a capitalist utopia there would be administrative districts that would allow for various regulatory schemes to be tested and compared scientifically, so even if one local government did make the mistake of offering a state-sponsored monopoly, the mistake would quickly be realized and corrected.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Optimizing social welfare (regardless of time window) through regulation isn't capitalism at all.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    It's American capitalism. We just lost our way. "Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can surely be ﬂourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged." - Adam Smith
    - grandalf 10y ago
      Exactly, just as democracy is a way to maximize the power of the average person, capitalism is a way to maximize her economic freedom.
  - grandalf 10y ago
    Admittedly since children cannot vote our government will always be biased toward the interests of adults and will operate on a time horizon that steals from the future to benefit the present. However in a utopian version, perhaps there would be some mechanism by which the longer-term interests of children could be represented democratically. I would also argue that in a capitalist utopia there would not be things that we typically call market failures, since institutions would emerge to solve the problems based on market incentives. Also, I'm not arguing that a capitalist utopia could exist, just that it is sometimes useful to offer contrast to the idea that big firms must somehow have an enlightened and altruistic vision in order to make investments like the one in the article. It could in fact just be the true north of the profit motive animating longer-term planning than we typically see (due to perverse incentives that focus most businesses on very short-term planning).
- deleted 10y ago
narrator 10y ago
You are referring to license monopoly. There are actually three kinds of local monopolies: margin monopoly, limited-space monopoly and license monopoly. Von Mises does a very good survey of these types of monopolies, monopoly prices and the conditions under which each exists [1]. Von Mises is a very deep thinker on this topic from a classical liberal perspective. He does agree that monopolies exist, but takes care to define the conditions under which they can exist. If a government wants to provide the best competitive environment, there are steps that can be taken to mitigate monopoly conditions from arising. [1]. https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/764 https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/764

stjacobs 10y ago

, , El Daz,, rref b TV rrrTV, Rev, r

GregBuchholz 10y ago

>The spectrum is a public good, and it is scarce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband

__jal 10y ago
I assume that you consider the link to refute the 'scarce' part. It doesn't.
- eatbitseveryday 10y ago
  It is often useful to support statements such as these.
  - Johnythree 10y ago
    A fellow by the name of Claude Shannon wrote a book about it. Ultra-Wideband doesn't create new bandwidth. It just re-uses the existing spectrum in a different way. And by raising the general background noise it steals bandwidth from all the other users, so everybody is worse off. Or to put it another way "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
    - GregBuchholz 10y ago
      Scarcity by itself doesn't seem a significant enough aspect to warrant the FCC regulation that we have though. Think of other scarce resources like platinum. If ultra-wide band (or similar) technology was used back in the 1920's, I don't think the push for regulation would have been as strong, since jamming / interference wouldn't have been a driver. I think we've got a technical solution to the original social problem, it is just that it arrived 100 years later. https://www.shoretel.com/history-federal-communications-commission-fcc https://www.shoretel.com/history-federal-communications-comm...
      - grandalf 10y ago
        This is an interesting point. Using spread spectrum techniques would increase the cost of the radio hardware involved, and might hinder adoption. Also, there would need to be regulations on signal quality, since a bad citizen in a shared-spectrum scheme adversely impacts others.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]