Jinn of Quality and Risk

Disaster for European Telcos
European governments have sucked capital from the telcos, resulting in wireless data disaster (NYT). European telcos bid $billions on 3G (third-generation) cellular licenses for frequencies throughout Europe. European governments had hired game theorists to design auctions with the intensity of casino games; when the dust settled, these governments were some $130 billion richer. That is roughly equal to all the money raised in share offerings on European stock markets in 1999, making the process "one of the biggest nationalizations of private capital since the Russian Revolution." And when the bubble burst, the telcos found themselves with licenses for a technology that doesn't quite exist, an infrastructure that can't support it, and lots of debt.