Abstract: Spectrum regulation is widely considered backwards with lots
of room for improvement. Many papers complain about it. But suppose you
were standing on a desert island and a regulatory genie granted you
three wishes for spectrum regulation --- no need to convince
legislators, bribe lobbyists, or worry about incumbent companies wanting
to preserve their profit margins. What should you ask for assuming that
you really did care about the public good for the long run? I contend
that not only do we not know the answer, we're not even sure how we
would know the right answer even if we saw it.
To attempt to move us forward, I will start with the concrete example of
the television whitespaces to hopefully bring some of the purely
technical issues into focus, and will then shift to a mixed perspective
that tries to take the issue of "regulatory overhead" and "light-handed
regulation" seriously. The hope is to suggest an avenue of attack that
might lead some insights that will hopefully bring us closer to being
able to make our regulative wishes clear.