Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

There's an excellent article on Open Spectrum by Sir Lawrence Lessig. For example:

Property systems are not free. To make sense, their benefits must outweigh their costs. Party members count two sorts of benefits from a property regime. The first is coordination?making sure that users of the spectrum don't conflict with each other. The second is allocation?making sure that the right to use a bit of spectrum is given to the highest valued user. Both benefits are indeed important. Yet both come at a cost. And if we could achieve at least some of these benefits without suffering the worst of these costs, then the gain from propertizing spectrum becomes harder to justify.