Sunday, March 31, 2002

Naturalizing the Net: Thanks to Jock GIll for turning us on to a landmark document in the advance of the Net: IKEDA Nobuo's The Spectrum as Commons, at Japan's Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) site. It blows away the brute-force one-to-many scarce-resource notions on which our undrstanding of radio was founded at the height of the Industrial Age: The use of spectrum dates back to the beginning of the last century, though initially it was used only for military radio communications. As a result of heightened calls in the U.S. industrial sector for the release of radio spectrum to the civilian sector, the Radio Law was revised in 1927 to allow radio frequencies to be allocated to private companies. The exceptional system of frequency allocation based on governmental licenses in the market economy is alleged to be necessary due to the [base "]scarcity[per thou] of spectrum. Yet economists have argued that the market mechanism serves as a means to allocate scarce resources efficiently by awarding the property right of bandwidth to individual users (Coase 1959). At the time of the Radio Law's enactment, the industrial sector sought full [base "]freedom of business[per thou], but the federal government (particularly the Department of the Navy) opposed the release of radio spectrum to the civilian sector. It was a compromise, due to this conflict of interests, that the system of frequency allocation was instituted by the Federal Radio Commission, predecessor of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). (Benkler 1999). As the wireless technologies available at the time did not enable general users to hold two-way communications, a radio broadcasting system was created in which transmissions were made one-way from the broadcasting station. The receiver, called radio, could do nothing but convert radio waves into sound. Since the only way to discriminate signals from noise was to broadcast with a large output power, the license was awarded for a whole region, in which one station emitted radio waves over a wide area by high power. This spectrum utilization was extended to communication systems and never changed in the past 70 years. As a result, the inefficient use of spectrum has become one of the most serious obstacles for the evolution of broadband communications. Good stuff. It even sources Kevin Werbach. 6:27:21 AM    comment []

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