In Sweden the 3G frequencies were dispersed for free using a "beauty contest" method - potential operators submitted buildout and investment plans and the regulator picked the ones with the most aggressive yet realistic plans. They also had to commit to minimum population coverage requirements. The idea being the money was better spent building the networks than in government coffers.

Is there a land-value tax [1] equivalent for spectrum?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

The spectrum is paid for by the auction winners. A new auction happens yearly. Spectrum isn't traded in the market like land. It's leased by the government on a yearly contract. So no tax is needed.

Is every band of spectrum re-auctioned every year? How do companies make multi-year investments?

If you had a new auction every year nobody would put money into infrastructure development. Mobile providers spend billions every year maintaining and upgrading networks - there's no way they would do that if it was possible to lose the spectrum they were using.

That sounds like an implementation of a 100% LV tax on radio frequencies.

It's public ownership + periodically auctioned leases, so it's hard to calculate a LV rate equivalent. The closest arrangement I can think of with respect to land would be Chinese real estate, where "title" is legally a 99-year lease from the government.

Optimal for whom? What is an optimal use of spectrum for me will probably not be optimal for most people.

"and is therefore working against the public interest."

Beyond allocations for government and emergency services, there's no such thing as a public interest. Different people have different interests.

I agree. I wonder if it would be sufficient to just allow companies to sue each other in case of intentional interference, and otherwise just allow free play. I suspect there is so much value in everyone cooperating that we would more or less sort it out, without needing restrictions on who can operate at which frequencies, by handing out frequency band monopolies to the three highest paying bidders.

That's basically how unlicensed wireless (e.g. 802.11 wireless ethernet) works, and it seems to be working okay. I think increased unlicensed spectrum would be great.

Another option would be to have something like a hybrid of the unlicensed and HAM bands with more liberal output power restrictions than unlicensed spectrum where you have to pass a test and get a proper (inexpensive) license to use the band, but you can do more-or-less whatever you want within the band as long as long as you identify your station, stay within output power limits, and don't intentionally interfere with anyone.

It does not work OK at all. Try being in any dense area such as an urban apartment building. There are 30 networks I can see on all 11 wifi channels. Its totally unusable.

Is that an issue with unlicensed spectrum, or an issue with trying to provide 30 separate encrypted comms channels over a narrow bandwidth in a dense space?

Surely, increasing unlicensed spectrum would alleviate this by providing for more channels...

That was roughly how things were developing until sometime in the 1920s, according to an old paper in Law & Economics. By my quarter-century-old memory it claimed that kind of approach worked all right and got replaced after a scare campaign and power grab by Herbert Hoover and friends.

I wonder if it would still work in the current situation though. People did not have 10+ radio transmitters at home/on them in 1920s. Would we just replicate the music loudness war in radio waves?

We have it working now. What would change to make it not work if licensing was abandoned? A loudness war would leave people without connectivity. That's exactly the opposite of what everyone pays for, and what everyone wants. I don't see why we'd want to sabotage ourselves, just because it becomes easier to do.

Because without limits / licenses, company A uses range 1-5Hz, while company B uses 3-8Hz. Now A gets reports that B's equipment are interfering, but fixes that quickly by bumping up power. A gets connectivity, B loses. Until they get the reports...

It's not like everything will suddenly stop working. We'd just have a constant war of A vs B vs C vs ... For a similar situation see the internet's buffer bloat. Everyone goes "how do we make the connection faster? bigger buffers!" and now we all have crazy buffer sizes on each node in path and all get crappy connections because of it. We do sabotage ourselves all the time in technology.

That's not how markets work. The war-mongering companies would quickly disappear, as they wouldn't be able to deliver service to their paying customers. The providers willing to work together, and actually make it work, would win over the clients of these other aggressive companies.

Companies that spend time sabotaging each other, rather than focusing on delivering service to their clients, deserve to die. And, in any sane economy, they will.

> That's not how markets work. [...] The providers willing to work together, and actually make it work, would win over the clients of these other aggressive companies.

Can you bring up some good examples of that? We've got the mentioned loudness war, patent trolls, insurance companies with race to the bottom, people destroying the earth right now and who will keep ignoring global warming where it's profitable, antibiotic resistance via over-prescription, internet buffer bloat, software size bloat, etc.

I love the idealistic view of the sane economy, but no, that's so not how markets work at the moment. Especially in this case - how exactly would any non-war-mongering company stay in business if the name of the game is "how wide/loud can you transmit"? It's not that companies are sabotaging each other. It's that if companies can make a better product on an unregulated RF market, they will. This will most likely get into someone else's way and those in turn will have to upgrade as well. There's only constant improvement on both sides.

If you're able to find any, you can compare the output spectrum from any RF toy that's FCC registered and one that's not. Guess which one bleeds noise on a wider spectrum around it's intended frequency.

Yes but the current economic system is not evolving in an idealistic world. You will have deception, bridery and other coercision method to push other players out of the market.

People collectively sabotage themselves all the time. It's called the tragedy of the commons.

Pardon my ignorance, is there a reason we couldn't theoretically just build out a state owned network, then lease back access to the operators? I would it would cut down significantly on infrastructure required, and create better competition.

Then the state would have to own the network. That's inconvenient and a bit prone to corruption.

The Free Market Knows Best.

What mechanism do you propose to more optimally utilize scarce resources? How do you measure degrees of need/want and fulfillment of those?

Do you have a better alternative?

Generally bureaucracies don't have a very good efficiency track record either.