Wireless deregulation lobby arrives in UK

Getting Coase with the Capitalists

Europeans may be surprised to be learn that they need a wireless infrastructure as broken as the one in the United States, but stand by for a deluge of ideology from American lobbyists to convince you otherwise.

Of course this time, the deregulation lobby isn't parading its poster children: Enron and ClearChannel. It knows it needs to present a warmer, fuzzier, more populist face.

So the task has fallen to Canadian blogger Cory Doctorow. Doctorow described the World Economic Forum's annual piss-up - positively, we think - as the "hyper-leet Davos forum"! Doctorow is paying a flying visit to the UK.

Naturally, the question we're supposed to consider is framed in terms of Chicago School economics, the same people who gave us monetarism. "Is Spectrum Commons or Property?" asks Doctorow, echoing the question posed at a two-day summit held at Stanford earlier this year. The question was first posed by free-market economist Ronald Coase, from - you guessed it - Chicago.

The only sensible answer is, "you wouldn't want to get there from here". Social policy is usually measured by social outputs. Business policy only makes sense when business itself is regarded as the manifestation of social activity, rather than some theoretical pie-charts.

We've seen that when a policy begins from such narrow ideological inputs the result is rarely a success. Linux makes a good contrast: it overcame both economic obstacles ("how can you make money?") and legal obstacles ("this is theft!") because the social outcomes of software libre were widely perceived to be a Good Thing.

Meanwhile, the deregulation lobby's frame of reference - the artificial commons/spectrum question - is so weak it doesn't even convince libertarians. At the Stanford Spectrum Summit in March, EFF co-founder John Gilmore pointed out from the floor that whatever spectrum policy the United States decided, nine tenths of the world would ignore it. Gilmore said the spectrum as property analogy breaks down because you can't put down fenceposts. Nokia's effervescent Erik Anderson had his own views here.

While not perfect, there's very little wrong with European wireless infrastructure when compared to the deregulated mess in the United States. Some operators carry a heavy burden for bidding in the short-lived spectrum auctions, but they owe much more of their debts to bad investments made during the last telecomms bubble. The deregulation lobby's warnings that wireless is so broken we need a US-fix are likely to be given short shrift, and rightly so.

The deregulation lobby has pinned its hopes on the Spectrum as the next Internet: a new playground where venture capitalists can make great fortunes. The US has always found it easier to create new frontiers to cross than to fix stuff.

We're between the bubbles, they hope. However the technology sector has blown it so badly by creating the Internet bubble - using the same rhetoric we keep hearing from the Spectrum lobby - that it could be many years before technology gains investors' trusts.

But however forlorn their hopes, vigilance is needed. We suggest watching two areas. Given the number of former Marxism Today staffers in British think-tanks, the lobby may well get a hearing. Many of these writers, who mesh with Downing Street's policy staff, born-again libertarians who swapped out one simple ideology for another at the turn of the nineties, may well be dazzled.

Another area to watch is whether spectrum deregulation becomes part of the agenda of the World Bank and the IMF. The two traditionally impose conditions in the name of "liberalizing markets", typically favoring established US interests.

It sounds nuts - but stranger things have happened. ®

Related Story

Radio Intel