Of course, content providers and infrastructure providers do not buy licenses altruistically.
I think we're seeing Facebook being willing to invest in tech and potentially license fees because the ROI of having Facebook in a village can be estimated and offering this hardware looks like a worthwhile investment.
While this sounds like a cynical perspective, it is not. Suppose a typical company would analyze the ROI and conclude that if the payout doesn't happen in 2 years it is not worth it.
Facebook may be considering a 10 year ROI and thus may be acting both selfishly and also taking on infrastructure risk that has suffered from market failure until 2016 since no providers of first world infrastructure have opted to invest.
In a capitalist utopia, anything with positive ROI would receive investment, and all risks could be accurately hedged, allowing all available capital to be fully utilized.
There may be some circumstances where it can help, but it does not eliminate scarcity.
It doesn't.
Ultra-Wideband doesn't create new bandwidth. It just re-uses the existing spectrum in a different way.
And by raising the general background noise it steals bandwidth from all the other users, so everybody is worse off.
Or to put it another way "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
https://www.shoretel.com/history-federal-communications-comm...
With spectrum, there's also a real-time use component. People who consume platinum generally don't consume it in a way that in any way resembles communication use. This is related to another key reason governments hold on to the control of spectrum allocation: military interests.
Also, there would need to be regulations on signal quality, since a bad citizen in a shared-spectrum scheme adversely impacts others.
Yes. Including arbitrary licenses enforced by local governments to raise the barrier to entry and restrict interconnected innovation through forcing all players to route through a central (likely selfish) entity. This does not benefit the public.
Not sure how a corrupt government is part of your definition of a capitalist utopia.
In my definition of a capitalist utopia, there exists the optimal amount of regulation to maximize long term welfare. This means no regulations that benefit the next 3 years at the expense of the future, and also none that benefit the next 20 at the expense of the longer-term future. Regulations that do exist are consistently enforced without corruption or bureaucratic waste.
In our actual (non-utopian) system, most regulations have the side-effect of benefitting one constituency or interest group over another, or one relevant time-horizon over another (most are profoundly short-sighted).
Also, in a capitalist utopia there would be administrative districts that would allow for various regulatory schemes to be tested and compared scientifically, so even if one local government did make the mistake of offering a state-sponsored monopoly, the mistake would quickly be realized and corrected.
Well, yes. One of the functions of government is to adjudicate incompatible desires.
This doesn't mean it always should, but something is going to play that role, and if it isn't a government, it is something that will be called a government once the shooting stops.
"Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged." - Adam Smith
However in a utopian version, perhaps there would be some mechanism by which the longer-term interests of children could be represented democratically.
I would also argue that in a capitalist utopia there would not be things that we typically call market failures, since institutions would emerge to solve the problems based on market incentives.
Also, I'm not arguing that a capitalist utopia could exist, just that it is sometimes useful to offer contrast to the idea that big firms must somehow have an enlightened and altruistic vision in order to make investments like the one in the article. It could in fact just be the true north of the profit motive animating longer-term planning than we typically see (due to perverse incentives that focus most businesses on very short-term planning).
At the end of the day, it's a response to the tragedy of the commons problem, designed on the theory of making the commons a lot less common (exclusively licensing sections of spectrum to approved users).
Most third world countries have enthusiastically adoped mobile phones and have leap-frogged the creation of landline networks.
The result of this is two-fold: The Radio Spectrum is heavily used, and also very inefficiently used as so much traffic which should be carried by landlines is forced onto mobile networks.
If you've traveled in remote areas of Thailand, Cambodia or even Laos, you'll be aware of the incredible penetration of mobile phones and even the Internet.