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That’s a mistaken view. Coase argues precisely that the market would self-regulate by broadcasters determining the spectrum interferences with each other and dr

by ethn 7y ago

That’s a mistaken view. Coase argues precisely that the market would self-regulate by broadcasters determining the spectrum interferences with each other and drafting financial agreements to ameliorate those interferences. Not by having an initial legal monopoly, which was abhorrent to the Chicago School. He believes that the natural institution of private property in the sense of contract through the traditional court system is enough of a regulation and no special regulation (e.g. FCC) is needed. Section 5 sophisticatedly exposits the specific case on how the free market solves frequency interference in admonishment of the special regulation. Excerpts of his discourse: “All property rights interfere with the ability of people to use resources.What has to be insured is that the gain from interference more than offsets the harm it produces. There is no reason to suppose that the optimum situation is one in which there is no interference” “The operator whose signals were interfered with, if he had the right to stop such interference,would be willing to forego this right if he were paid more than the amount by which the value of his service was decreased by this interference or the costs which he would have to incur to offset it.” He goes on to talk about the case of deliberate interference. This is about deliberate spectrum preference overlap not accidental interference. And Coase disambiguates his advocation if it still isn’t clear: “What this analysis demonstrates,so far as the radio industry is concerned, is that there is no analytical difference between the problem of interference between operators on a single frequency and that of interference between operators on adjacent frequencies.” “It has been the burden of this article to show that the problems posed by the broadcasting industry do not call for any fundamental changes in the legal and economic arrangements which serve other industries.” You’re mistaking market efficiency, transactional costs and externality. It’s argued that legal rules are necessary to instead reduce externalities by market failures, which existed long before Coase. Coase instead contributed to the limits of cost savings about transaction costs provided by the formation of business and maintenance of markets in The Nature of the Firm (aside from his free market advocation of the spectrum), which became Coase’s theorem. I’m educated as an Electrical Engineer; it’s clear to us spectrum rivalry isn’t contentious but true. Even amongst a single broadcaster within his own spectrum he runs into constant constraint and trade off by his own bandwidth. I’m not arguing for or against the ideas of Coase, only correcting that public presentation of his ideas as an interventionist. Especially since Coase didn’t think externalities were unfortunate, instead he thought that was a “dirty word”, and seldom found a case for a government all to eager to specially regulate.

wahern 7y ago
> I’m educated as an Electrical Engineer; it’s clear to us spectrum rivalry isn’t contentious but true. But it's rivalrous in a distinctive way--it's a function of contemporaneous and evolving limitations of the existing state of technology and usage patterns. To quote a famous IEEE Spectrum article, "Moreover, interference is not some inherent property of spectrum. It's a property of devices. A better receiver will pick up a transmission where an earlier one heard only static. Whether a new radio system "interferes" with existing ones is entirely dependent on the equipment involved. Consequently, the extent to which there appears to be a spectrum shortage largely depends not on how many frequencies are available but on the technologies that can be deployed. Many regulations intended to promote harmony of the airwaves have instead, by putting artificial limits on technology, created massive inefficiency in spectrum utilization." https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/the-end-of-spectrum-scarcity https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/the-end-of-spectr... What that's referring to are techniques like MIMO, beamforming, beam steering, etc. As David Reed is quoted and paraphrased as saying in that Salon article: '[We have stupid radios not because we haven't figured out how to make them smart but because there's been little reason to make them smart. They're designed to expect signal to be whatever comes in on a particular frequency, and noise to be everything on other frequencies.] 'The problem is more complex than just making smart radios, because some of the techniques for un-confusing the receiver are best implemented at the transmitter, or in a network of cooperating transmitters and receivers. It's not simply the radios. It's the systems architecture, stupid!' https://www.salon.com/2003/03/12/spectrum/ https://www.salon.com/2003/03/12/spectrum/ We're only beginning to scratch the service of the channel discernment improvements that can had with MIMO, beamforming, beam steering, and other techniques, but we're limited by the larger ecosystem of devices and regulations, which is largely an artifact of a system which assumes a fixed interference burden across vast geographical areas. The channel capacity of a band of spectrum is, in the absence of coherent interference, point-to-point as a theoretical matter because non-coherent electromagnetic radiation does not interfere. To reiterate, interference as typically experienced is a function of the inability to differentiate a signal which is present or which could be present if the transmitting and receiving systems were more sophisticated, and (according to the theoretical work) this is ultimately a computational problem.[1] Thus "spectrum scarcity", at least in the context of P2P wireless networks, is a function of technology, not an intrinsic, fixed property. Taking that context into account--that interference and thus the degree of rivalrousness for any band of spectrum is a complex, dynamic function that dissipates as technology progresses--we can end up drawing different conclusions than from the technological presumptions behind Coase's argument. For example, as someone else mentioned, maybe we should be promoting technological development by letting people freely interfere, which can be done by imposing no rules whatever, not even a property regime. Absent power limits, that's pretty much what we do with WiFi. Similarly, a lot of theoretical radio techniques are first explored and applied by the military precisely because of the adversarial context, and they're consistently fruitful because the physical limits of what's possible are still quite distant. > I’m not arguing for or against the ideas of Coase, only correcting that public presentation of his ideas as an interventionist. I never had the sense that Coase was characterized as interventionist, at least not in the context of FCC reforms. If refuting that is your goal, fair enough. IME, however, in popular discourse anything "free market" is generally considered non-interventionist, and as compared to FCC regulations contemporaneous with his paper that's a fair characterization. But from my perspective (and AFAIU of many others, especially in the SDR community), establishing a private property regime is still rather interventionist, no less than it is with copyrights and patents, relative to the baseline of nothing. Nobody claims taxi medallion systems are non-interventionist, even when medallions are a freely transferable property right (e.g. NYC, sub-class of medallions in SF, etc). Uber would certainly disagree. [1] This is why 5G achieves aggregate bandwidth multiples in the same bands even though 4G channel efficiency is near the Shannon limit. See https://cmte.ieee.org/futuredirections/2017/05/17/taking-a-fresh-look-at-5g-technology-enablers/ https://cmte.ieee.org/futuredirections/2017/05/17/taking-a-f...

by ethn 7y ago

wahern 7y ago

> I’m educated as an Electrical Engineer; it’s clear to us spectrum rivalry isn’t contentious but true. But it's rivalrous in a distinctive way--it's a function of contemporaneous and evolving limitations of the existing state of technology and usage patterns. To quote a famous IEEE Spectrum article, "Moreover, interference is not some inherent property of spectrum. It's a property of devices. A better receiver will pick up a transmission where an earlier one heard only static. Whether a new radio system "interferes" with existing ones is entirely dependent on the equipment involved. Consequently, the extent to which there appears to be a spectrum shortage largely depends not on how many frequencies are available but on the technologies that can be deployed. Many regulations intended to promote harmony of the airwaves have instead, by putting artificial limits on technology, created massive inefficiency in spectrum utilization." https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/the-end-of-spectrum-scarcity https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/the-end-of-spectr... What that's referring to are techniques like MIMO, beamforming, beam steering, etc. As David Reed is quoted and paraphrased as saying in that Salon article: '[We have stupid radios not because we haven't figured out how to make them smart but because there's been little reason to make them smart. They're designed to expect signal to be whatever comes in on a particular frequency, and noise to be everything on other frequencies.] 'The problem is more complex than just making smart radios, because some of the techniques for un-confusing the receiver are best implemented at the transmitter, or in a network of cooperating transmitters and receivers. It's not simply the radios. It's the systems architecture, stupid!' https://www.salon.com/2003/03/12/spectrum/ https://www.salon.com/2003/03/12/spectrum/ We're only beginning to scratch the service of the channel discernment improvements that can had with MIMO, beamforming, beam steering, and other techniques, but we're limited by the larger ecosystem of devices and regulations, which is largely an artifact of a system which assumes a fixed interference burden across vast geographical areas. The channel capacity of a band of spectrum is, in the absence of coherent interference, point-to-point as a theoretical matter because non-coherent electromagnetic radiation does not interfere. To reiterate, interference as typically experienced is a function of the inability to differentiate a signal which is present or which could be present if the transmitting and receiving systems were more sophisticated, and (according to the theoretical work) this is ultimately a computational problem.[1] Thus "spectrum scarcity", at least in the context of P2P wireless networks, is a function of technology, not an intrinsic, fixed property. Taking that context into account--that interference and thus the degree of rivalrousness for any band of spectrum is a complex, dynamic function that dissipates as technology progresses--we can end up drawing different conclusions than from the technological presumptions behind Coase's argument. For example, as someone else mentioned, maybe we should be promoting technological development by letting people freely interfere, which can be done by imposing no rules whatever, not even a property regime. Absent power limits, that's pretty much what we do with WiFi. Similarly, a lot of theoretical radio techniques are first explored and applied by the military precisely because of the adversarial context, and they're consistently fruitful because the physical limits of what's possible are still quite distant. > I’m not arguing for or against the ideas of Coase, only correcting that public presentation of his ideas as an interventionist. I never had the sense that Coase was characterized as interventionist, at least not in the context of FCC reforms. If refuting that is your goal, fair enough. IME, however, in popular discourse anything "free market" is generally considered non-interventionist, and as compared to FCC regulations contemporaneous with his paper that's a fair characterization. But from my perspective (and AFAIU of many others, especially in the SDR community), establishing a private property regime is still rather interventionist, no less than it is with copyrights and patents, relative to the baseline of nothing. Nobody claims taxi medallion systems are non-interventionist, even when medallions are a freely transferable property right (e.g. NYC, sub-class of medallions in SF, etc). Uber would certainly disagree. [1] This is why 5G achieves aggregate bandwidth multiples in the same bands even though 4G channel efficiency is near the Shannon limit. See https://cmte.ieee.org/futuredirections/2017/05/17/taking-a-fresh-look-at-5g-technology-enablers/ https://cmte.ieee.org/futuredirections/2017/05/17/taking-a-f...