My objection is that RP approaches nearly all the issues from an ideological point of view rather than a practical one. Now, an ideology that isn’t practical isn’t worth much as an ideology. It isn’t the ideology that I’m objecting to. It’s the presentation.

The public isn’t ideological, they are practical. So it is of little value to tell the public that you are going to abolish the Federal Reserve when the public has got the slightest idea why you would want to. So you either don’t talk about that issue or you have to be prepared to sell the public on it. The problem is, RP has way to many such ideas that he has to sell the public on. So he needs to focus his campaign on just a few issues and he needs to show the practical benefits of what he wants to do. And that includes the war in Iraq.

Instead of saying, “just get out.” He needs to say something like, “We need to set a date for when we get out and let the Iraqis use that time to come to a reconciliation. If they can’t do that, they bear the responsibility for any future conflict. Our troops cannot force Iraqis to cooperate with each other no matter how long we stay, and our responsibility from that point onward is only to try to limit foreign intervention.”

Such a response illustrates the futility of our current efforts while recognizing that even withdrawal has consequences that must be addressed.

No, you can’t. They’re waves; they refract around corners.

“Properly”? What does that mean?

It means getting adequate power densities over the entire target area while keeping the power densities in the blocked area well below the minimum power density for reception.

how can you consider yourself anything but a collectivist if you don’t think the free market can handle such minor issues as how a particular market can be served most efficiently?

I have enormous faith in the market — but I don’t believe that the market can violate the laws of physics. There are no loaves and fishes here to perform miracles with. There are fundamental technological constraints that all the market wisdom in the world can’t make go away. This is the fundamental issue we’ve been arguing over. You have blind faith that the market can whip up loaves and fishes out of thin air, and I believe that the laws of physics can’t be violated.

I reject that notion entirely. The greatest praises of history go to those who have successfully debunked the common wisdom of their time.

Then go ahead and debunk this one yourself. Go out there are design an antenna that will solve the problem of the donut hole. If there isn’t a Nobel Prize in it for you, there’s probably at least a few million dollars in patent royalties.

As such, there would tremendous amount of capital trying to figure out how to accomplish it.

Sure, if there’s enough capital trying to figure out how to make gold out of base metals, why, it should be no problem! ;-)

It is irony of monstrous proportions for you to suggest on the internet that interoperability is impossible in a high-tech free market.

Um, perhaps you’re not aware of this, but the Internet was started as a {shudder} government project that financed by {horrors!} tax dollars. To this day, the US government retains final control over the Internet protocols. It is most definitely NOT a creature of the market. You chose a very bad example to make your point.

Let’s talk a bit more about radio and call it a night.

Agreed — this has dragged out too much. Let me summarize my case. You argue without any evidence that the market should be able to come up with magical solutions to technological problems that you don’t understand but consider unimportant. I believe that the laws of physics continue to work even when you really, really don’t want them to work.

Communications by means of radio waves requires a huge and very complicated technology. Coordinating the system so that manufacturers and service providers (who have very different economic situations) is difficult enough; making it convenient and inexpensive for consumers makes it REALLY complicated. Gad, if you only knew the complexities involved in the whole 3G technology rollout! Now, markets exist solely to coordinate the economic activities of the members of society, and we know that markets coordinate those activities better than any other scheme. But there are some situations that are so horribly complicated, that involve so much coordination in advance of any expenditure of capital, that government can perform a huge service by laying out the basic ground rules under which the market will operate. That’s what the FCC does, and the allocation of spectrum is one of its most important functions. This function has been studied at length by economists in an attempt to understand the best procedures for allocating spectrum in the most efficient manner possible. There remain lots of nasty little gotchas that the FCC cannot solve and probably will never solve. But the alternative — allocating spectrum without any structuring of the spectrum by the government — would surely lead to less effective utilization of this valuable resource.

You simply block waves that would travel in the direction of the “one jerk”.

This is not possible. To block the waves, you’d need to set up a conductive hemisphere around the blocked zone. (Since the earth is a conductor, you wouldn’t need the lower half of the sphere.) So imagine a geodesic dome surfaced with chicken wire enclosing the blocked zone. If the blocked zone is a mile in diameter

Umm, can’t you just block it close to the source of the transmission, where you would only need a nominal amount of chicken wire?

If you’d like you can set up two smaller transmitters to cover the nearside and the farside of the “hole”

This is absurd. First off, it wouldn’t cover the accessible area properly. To do a good job covering the accessible area properly, you’d need lots of little subtransmitters.

“Properly”? What does that mean? If getting 100% coverage is important to the transmitter, he will set up the necessary subtransmitters to do it. If not, he’ll set up as many or as few as he believes cost-effective. This may not be what Chepe Noyon believes is “proper”, but seriously… how can you consider yourself anything but a collectivist if you don’t think the free market can handle such minor issues as how a particular market can be served most efficiently?

Yes, and I have no proof that hitting yourself on the head with a hammer hurts, because nobody has ever tried it,

I’m sure there are more than a few coroners that can attest to the damage of a hammer hitting a skull.

Aside from that, I’m more than willing, as you should have recognized by now, to discuss the issue from a theoretical perspective. My point is that you haven’t convinced me and tacking on “nobody is doing it!” is not persuasive because when you consider human nature, you realize there are other plausible reasons that it hasn’t happened yet.

If there were any merit whatsoever in your proposal, somebody somewhere would have tried it — but nobody ever has. Doesn’t that tell you something?

I reject that notion entirely. The greatest praises of history go to those who have successfully debunked the common wisdom of their time.

“But no!” you say. “The industry would itself set standards for frequencies, and the market would sort it out!” Sure, that works when you’re selling apples or newspapers, but with complicated technology like this, you have to get a hundred details to match up

Interoperability is a very valuable thing. As such, there would tremendous amount of capital trying to figure out how to accomplish it.

It is irony of monstrous proportions for you to suggest on the internet that interoperability is impossible in a high-tech free market.

Had that been done, the US and the USSR, being the only two entities capable of launching satellites in the early 60s

You’re right that the government had already bastardized the market. It may be possible to place enough controls on the government to make it workable, but one theoretical discuss is enough for today.

Let’s talk a bit more about radio and call it a night.

Chris, your analogy is wrong. Air is everybody’s because there’s lots more of it than anybody needs to use. That’s not the case with spectrum.

And your comment about water suggests that you don’t live in the West, where the saying is, “Whiskey is fer drinkin’ and water is fer fightin’.” Water is a limited resource and people have been fighting over it since the first settlers. The “first-come, first-served” rule was the initial approach, but it didn’t work well, as battles (legal as well as physical) were never-ending. The solution was to provide more water from a gigantic dam-building effort, and then provide people with, guess what, licenses to the water. The government did with water something rather similar to what it does with spectrum — except that spectrum is a much more complicated resource.

What facts did I eschew?

Oh, just the laws of physics, that’s all. ;-)

You simply block waves that would travel in the direction of the “one jerk”.

This is not possible. To block the waves, you’d need to set up a conductive hemisphere around the blocked zone. (Since the earth is a conductor, you wouldn’t need the lower half of the sphere.) So imagine a geodesic dome surfaced with chicken wire enclosing the blocked zone. If the blocked zone is a mile in diameter, you’re talking about a structure bigger than any geodesic sphere that has ever been built. That’s what you’d need to build to block the radio waves.

If you’d like you can set up two smaller transmitters to cover the nearside and the farside of the “hole”

This is absurd. First off, it wouldn’t cover the accessible area properly. To do a good job covering the accessible area properly, you’d need lots of little subtransmitters. But since they’re all transmitting the same signal, the sum of their signals in the blocked zone would be just as strong as anywhere in the accessible zone.

You keep coming up with these crazy schemes that violate the laws of physics.

Would you please cite any other arguments you have made that I haven’t addressed? I have gone back through the exchange and can’t find any.

Pointing out that no one has made a serious effort, however, is all but meaningless.

Yes, and I have no proof that hitting yourself on the head with a hammer hurts, because nobody has ever tried it, but the lack of evidence arises because nobody has ever been stupid enough to try it. If there were any merit whatsoever in your proposal, somebody somewhere would have tried it — but nobody ever has. Doesn’t that tell you something?

When the economics change, the various owners will all have economic incentives to reallocate the assets appropriately.

Let’s walk through that scenario. We start with a total hodgepodge of homesteaded spectrum claims, with people using all sorts of different frequencies for all sorts of different things in different areas. In Cleveland, 100 KHz is used for FM radio, but in Houston it’s used for police and in Lubbock it’s used for baby monitors and in Denver it’s used for cordless phones and in Sacramento it’s used for cell phones. Of course, all of these technologies are far more expensive because manufacturers can’t enjoy economies of scale in building devices for a single frequency. Instead, when you buy a cell phone, you also buy a crystal for the frequency in your area, and every time you move to a different area, you change crystals (you have to have crystals for all the different areas you travel through).

“But no!” you say. “The industry would itself set standards for frequencies, and the market would sort it out!” Sure, that works when you’re selling apples or newspapers, but with complicated technology like this, you have to get a hundred details to match up, and every single owner of every single detail can scotch the deal by refusing to go along. If the industry settles on 100 KHz for cellphones, then it has to buy out the guy in Cleveland who’s using 100 KHz for his FM station, the guys in Houston, the guys in Lubbock, and so on. Each one of these guys has a big investment in the frequency he owns — you basically have to buy out his entire business to get his spectrum. Thus, setting up a standard would require the replacement of a lot of existing infrastructure. It’s as if zoning laws required you to purchase and demolish a dozen buildings in order to build one. The economics just don’t work.

You say that you would prefer a homesteading approach to allocation of space for geosynchronous satellites. Had that been done, the US and the USSR, being the only two entities capable of launching satellites in the early 60s, would have stuffed all the orbits full of broadband transmitters with wide angle antenna arrays so that they would own as much of the resource as possible. You would have been handing a monopoly to the governments of the two superpowers, and nothing to anybody else. That’s what you call an open market?

The owner of the airwaves is simply no one. It’s like the air, the water, fire, the universe…..no one owns them but all use them.

TARRAN,

You said, “Chris, you use excessive amounts of rhetoric, and seem to eschew facts and historical record in advancing your arguments.”

What was excessive in showing a flaw in Chepe’s logic?

What facts did I eschew?

If you understood the technological issues, I think you’d understand why spectrum has to be allocated in government auctions.

I don’t claim to be an expert, so I won’t deny that you could be correct, but you haven’t yet raised an issue that I didn’t already account for.

Nobody — NOBODY — who is close to the problem even contemplates anything else. There are more than a hundred nations…

States will take as much power as the citizens allow them to. If you could point to a state that has tried a homestead approach and failed miserably, that would be convincing. Pointing out that no one has made a serious effort, however, is all but meaningless.

By the way, I suppose that you guys would also support a homesteading approach to geosynchronous satellites.

I haven’t considered it long enough to be confident in my instinct, but yes, I would lean towards a homesteading approach unless and until you convinced me otherwise.

Jeff, the problem with outright sales instead of leases is that sales don’t permit regular updating of the licensing terms.

Sure they do, just not in a top-down manner. When the economics change, the various owners will all have economic incentives to reallocate the assets appropriately.

By the way, I suppose that you guys would also support a homesteading approach to geosynchronous satellites. Boy would THAT cause trouble! Shootout at the OK Orbit! ;-)

What could we do now? My vote would be to stop leasing the spectrum and just sell it. It would probably be purchased by the same people who are leasing it currently and then it would be up to the free market from there on in. If you’re concerned about monopolies, you could dictate that each firm could only buy a certain percent of the spectrum.

We would have had to have a government inspector confirm the power of the transmitter. Without that inspection, anybody could claim that their 1 watt transmitter was 100 watts, thereby grabbing up lots of spectrum without the accompanying investment.

Yes, reasonable efforts would have to be taken to eliminate fraud. Homesteading had the same problem and everything turned out ok.

Sure, you could negotiate with the geezer to buy him out, but the nature of the problem permits the geezer to charge extremely high rates for a tiny slice of spectrum — ruining the economics of the proposition.

Or what happens when more powerful transmitters become available? Sorry, there’s no market for them, because they’re bound to spill into somebody else’s territory.

Chepe, I totally have your back when it comes to using the govt to set some basic ground rules, but I’m gonna have to start calling you a collectivist if you can’t trust the free market to handle most of these issues.

We would have had to have a government inspector confirm the power of the transmitter. Without that inspection, anybody could claim that their 1 watt transmitter was 100 watts, thereby grabbing up lots of spectrum without the accompanying investment.

There would have been some serious standardization problems caused by new technology. For example, consider the transition from AM to FM. FM operates at lower powers than AM and uses completely different circuitry. But if we have AM transmitters scattered all over the spectrum, then the FM transmitters have to be configured to access a broad range of frequencies, which would have made it difficult to standardize receivers. The current system sets up bands that are dedicated to different technologies. Without that system, it might have been economically impossible to get FM off the ground. Same thing goes for TV. TV transmitters are particularly tricky, with a complex signal that can tolerate no interference. Yet if some old geezer has grabbed up spectrum overlapping what you need for your TV signal, you’re screwed. Sure, you could negotiate with the geezer to buy him out, but the nature of the problem permits the geezer to charge extremely high rates for a tiny slice of spectrum — ruining the economics of the proposition.

Let’s use the homesteading concept to sort this out. Imagine a 1920 Spectrum Homesteading Law that gives anybody the right to set up a transmitter at any frequency, with a bandwidth of 5 KHz , and all the territory within, say, 10 miles is his territory in that channel. Problem: what happens when receivers get more sensitive and somebody on the boundary between two transmitters is getting horrible interference? In fact, this problem applies not just to the boundary: as the sensitivity of the receivers increases, the interference zone expands into each transmitter’s territory. Yes, there will still be a zone in which the resident transmitter will be dominant, but there’s still a lot of territory that can’t receive any usable signal.

Or what happens when more powerful transmitters become available? Sorry, there’s no market for them, because they’re bound to spill into somebody else’s territory. Sure, you could buy out the neighbors, but you have to buy out ALL the neighbors — if even one neighbor refuses to sell, you’re screwed. Looks like we’ll all be stuck with little 100 watt transmitters for the rest of time…

I can think up lots more nasty scenarios. The FCC spends a lot of time hammering out some very tricky problems arising from technological change. You ought to read some of their deliberations some time — it’s terribly boring stuff as they work through all sorts of crazy contingencies.

A homesteading approach to allocation of spectrum would have greatly inhibited the progress of communications technology.

The Homestead Act of 1862 let anyone stake claims 160 acres at time. Similarly, you could choose an appropriate range plus and minus the primary signal.

That way, Mr. BH and Mr. CS both get the same asset and Mr. CS will be rewarded if he’s able to use his more efficiently.

You write “a high bandwith receiver produces crappy sound quality since it is snarfing up not only the signal that a person wants but the unwanted signals at adjacent frequencies.”

But if the high-bandwidth transmitter has snarfed up all those adjacent frequencies, then there aren’t any other signals at adjacent frequencies. That’s the whole idea — gobble up all the spectrum with your cheap transmitter and you’ve eliminated all the competition.

You may regard social utility as crap but I don’t. Moreover, your objection to social utility is spitting into the wind. Law is a social function, decided by society. Society determines law on its notions of social utility.

To address your side-point: a high bandwith receiver produces crappy sound quality since it is snarfing up not only the signal that a person wants but the unwanted signals at adjacent frequencies. There’s a reason why FM so quickly supplanted AM despite being relegated to less economical bits of spectrum. Many people preferred the benefits of less noise and clearer signals and were willing to pay a premium for it. I don’t think the bandwidth hog would do very well limiting himself to only the population buying the crappiest receivers.

Your approach rewards people who gobble up lots of bandwidth by wasting it.

There’s that social efficiency crap again. God, you remind me of me ten years ago when I was calling for Microsoft to be broken up.