Selling ownership of fishing rights over tracts of the ocean, while it has flaws, would be infinitely better than the free-for-all we have now, where nobody has an incentive to preserve any fish stocks.

The free-for-all exploitation of ocean resources that we have now is from the free market.

Fishing quotas that are enforced by regulatory bodies are what still prevent it from running rampant within the waters of said organizations.

What are you talking about? This is the absolute definition of the Tragedy of the Commons -- when you have a public resource it is in everyone's interest to exploit.

The free market does not just mean "anarchy! take everything!" There's no market here!

You comment is an appeal to extremes fallacy.

If you're resorting to arguing the semantic meaning of Free Market, then it is definitively "an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses."

With natural resources, the free market is certainly an unrestricted first-come first-serve market. Fishing quotas are restricted competition and price influential, which makes it not a free market, despite your attempts to redefine it as such to fit a narrative.

Fishing quotas, seasons and permits have been well established in the developed world for a long time.

Quotas, seasons, and permits aren't really as good. As a fisherman you have no incentive to catch below your quota, since you aren't rewarded for leaving anything on the table. And the quotas are usually too high for political reasons, to avoid losing votes. Either way, they are centrally planned.

A market solution would allow a fisherman to catch below quota and be rewarded in later years by replenished stocks in the waters he controlled.

> And the quotas are usually too high for political reasons, to avoid losing votes.

This is a problem with some of those quotas - they're not being set up right. That's the failure of democracy though, not of central planning per se.

> A market solution would allow a fisherman to catch below quota and be rewarded in later years by replenished stocks in the waters he controlled.

That may work, in a type of business with big inertia (i.e. where you can't go out of business over a single season), if we could parcel water like that. Sadly, fish colonies don't respect arbitrary lines we draw on maps. I don't know if such a market solution is ecologically possible; fish need space, and they often need to travel.

Adding onto that, I can't imagine the logistical nightmare of privatizing the entire ocean including international waters, besides the root of the issue in which it solves nearly no problems.

What if I buy a 1 meter by 1 meter parcel of the ocean and charge bottom of the barrel prices to dump industrial waste in it? What if that square of ocean was 100 meters off shore from a beach in Los Angeles? If you don't want that then we're right back to government regulations.

Iceland does this fairly effectively (use market based solutions).