Convergences

Google Comes to Town

On Tuesday, Nov. 18, Eric Schmidt  speaks on What's Ahead: Technology, Economic Growth and Open Government. The talk will also be webcast. "He will offer specifics on such topics as the need to build a 21st Century Infrastructure, support for research and innovation, repairs for our education system, and ways to make the government more open and responsive."

Then on Thursday, Nov. 20, Google D.C. Talks presents the first in a three-part series, Tech Agenda 2009: Building an Infrastructure for a 21st Century Economy.  "The event will examine the crucial role of technology in driving economic growth, with a special focus on the infrastructure needed to foster innovation: an open Internet, broadband access, and a smart energy grid."

Spectrum White Spaces

The FCC voted to open up the white spaces. All five Commissioners agreed, though Tate would prefer to limit the number of channels covered, and each issued his/her own statement. All emphasized the careful and tentative nature of the action; were they into Deng Xiaopeng quotations, they would have said "Mozhe shitou guo he" ("Crossing the river by feeling for stones").

The underlying Second Report and Order (08-260) will be published within a few days.

Chairman Martin commented:

Today’s action was advocated by a diverse coalition of consumer groups, technology leaders and Internet pioneers. Opening the white spaces will allow for the creation of a WiFi on steroids. It has the potential to improve wireless broadband connectivity and inspire an ever-widening array of new Internet based products and services for consumers. Consumers across the country will have access to devices and services that they may have only dreamed about before. I fully expect that everything from enhanced home broadband networks, to intelligent peer-to-peer devices, and even small communications networks will come into being in TV “white spaces.”

Tom Whitehead - Ave Atque Vale

Clay T. (Tom) Whitehead died in July. He was head of the Office of Telecommunications policy during the Nixon Administration, and a strong advocate of introducing market forces into the moribund broadcasting business. His WaPo obituary says:

His work had an enormous impact on the cable industry, which because of his efforts could get its own programming channels via satellites to a national audience. Before, that reach was impossible unless a cable channel wanted to lease land lines from the monopoly provider AT&T.

HBO, the Turner cable networks and C-Span were among the key beneficiaries of Dr. Whitehead's decisions.

He thought that TV broadcasters should pay for spectrum rather than receive it for free, or as a quid pro quo for political contributions, and he could fairly claim to be the catalyst for the auction system that was adopted later on. (Though never for TV.) The WaPo somehow missed that one. He also told me one time that he thought this threat to charge for spectrum use was a significant factor in the media' companies' hostility to Nixon. 

Spectrum White Spaces

DrewClark.com (The Politics of Telecom, Media and Technology) discusses the spectrum white spaces issue, complete with many good links.

Clark is connected with Tom Hazlett and the George Mason crowd, and likes the idea of auctioning off the spectrum. Certainly, this is a better idea than giving it away to the broadcasters, but I still have a nagging concern that auctions put the government in the position of a rentier, charging for scarcity of a resource without contributing anything to the process of development and exploitation. I am a bit of a Lockean; I like to see investment mixed in with resources as a foundation of property rights. 

Also, if the government collects for scarcity, then it has a huge incentive to ensure that the resources remain scarce, and much of the dispute here is over this very question -- is spectrum really a scarce resource?  The last thing needed is to replace government giveaways with induced scarcity. 

Filling in the Blanks

In telecom lingo, “white spaces” is the spectrum adjacent to existing TV channels, which now goes unused for fear of interference with TV. High tech companies are pushing to open it up to general, unlicensed use, arguing that the technology is now good enough so that devices can be equipped with adequate interference-prevention ware. TV broadcasters are adamantly opposed.

The FCC just released a technical paper in which it agrees with high tech, basically, though many caveats are attached. (See ars technica for background), and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is pushing the issue forward, again with caveats:  

 Additionally, Martin said that all devices operating on the spectrum would have to have sensing capabilities that would automatically shut the device down if it comes into interference with broadcast spectrum, as well as access to a geo-location database that tracks mobile devices by locating them through their specific IP address, media-access-control address, radio-frequency identification or other location-based information.

 The fundamental debate is between a “property rights” model, in which spectrum is individually owned, and a “commons” model, in which spectrum is open to all, with non-interference enforced by the government. It is an extremely interesting question, and the arguments, at their best, are articulated at a high level – see the interchange between Phil Weiser/Dale Hatfield of the University of Colorado and Tom Hazlett of George Mason. 

But Hazlett also makes a crucial point in the course of discussing the differences:

Both approaches aim to facilitate a rights regime that enables markets to allocate radio spectrum, abandoning the traditional regime in place since 1927, wherein administrative allocation decides how to use the spectrum resource.

 So it looks like progress will be made, however it turns out.

The debate is also reminiscent of the arguments over the public lands that roiled America in the 19^th Century. That one was resolved in favor of the idea of the public lands as a commons, to which all were to have access, with title to valuable resources determined according to Lockean criterion of mixing your labor with nature. It worked out sometimes, and sometimes not (for example, water rights are still frozen into un-economic forms). It would be interesting for the FCC to pan the stream of our national experience with the public lands to see if there is any useful gold there.