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| Toward an Evolutionary Regime for Spectrum Governance
ISBN: 9780815708483
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Brookings Institution Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Telecommunication policy.; Radio frequency allocation.;
A Brookings Institution Press and American Enterprise Institute publication
The federal government's approach to regulating the spectrum remains largely administrative, causing major inefficiency and waste. Ironically, just as the FCC has begun to use market mechanisms, some people are pushing to treat spectrum as a common resource open to all entrants. Commons proponents maintain that with new, interference-avoiding technology, licensing is becoming unnecessary and impractical.
In this brief study, noted economist William J. Baumol evaluates two options for spectrum governance--a tradable license (market) approach and a commons approach. He compares the practicality of each in terms of six key issues: interference, adequacy of investment in innovation, monopoly power, preservation of diversity, service to rural areas, and the tension between vested interests and the need for adaptable arrangements.
Baumol demonstrates that, while neither approach is ideal, a commons regime has severe shortcomings. Above all, he emphasizes the importance of impermanence in the granting of licenses to preserve the flexibility to adapt to unforeseen technological and other developments.
William Jack Baumol was born in the South Bronx, New York on February 22, 1922. He served in the Army during World War II and got a job at the Agriculture Department, where he worked on allocating grain supplies to starving countries. He graduated from City College and enrolled in the London School of Economics in 1947, after initially being rejected. Less than six weeks after school started, he was hired to become a member of the faculty. He taught at Princeton University from 1949 until 1970 and then taught at New York University from 1971 until his retirement in 2014. As an economist, he identified Baumol's cost disease, which explains why the cost of services, like haircuts and college educations, rises faster than the cost of goods, like T-shirts. He published dozens of books, hundreds of papers, and several congressional testimonies on entrepreneurs, environmental policy, corporate finance, stock sales, the economics of Broadway theaters, inflation, and competition and monopolies. He died on May 4, 2017 at the age of 95. (Bowker Author Biography) |
