5 responses

• Jim Cowie Apr 16, 2008
   

  Interesting perspective collision here. Government suit-and-tie intellectuals construct policy targets and add rules to auction to try to bring about the intended results. Google sees the wink-wink, nudge-nudge that's been built into the system, identifies the minimally painful way to exploit the backdoor left by policy wonks, exploits it for the greater good, walks away happy. All happy? Maybe. Someone out there might have paid more (a lot more) and that lost money belongs to the taxpayers. By setting it free, maybe we all gain more than we lost. But then why have an auction at all?

   
• jhota Apr 16, 2008
   

  i find it amusing that it seems to be mostly Republicans whining (what happened to a free market economy?). if they didn't want this outcome, they shouldn't have written the rules this way. i'll admit to having HUGE personal issues with the FCC and the way the government views the EM spectrum. to me, almost anything that opens up a network is to the good.

   
• todd Apr 17, 2008
   

  there's another issue here: spectrum licenses are going to have to become obsolete

   
• todd Apr 17, 2008
   

  part-11 (2.4 and 5.8GHz unlicensed bands) prove that we can have massive, unregulated deployment of spectra even given today's technology. with sufficient additional sophistication, we will be able to effective detect and code/hop around interfererence with nearly infinite bandwidth.

   
• todd Apr 17, 2008
   

  spectrum licenses will begin to seem as quaint as 20th century intellectual property right law is starting to.