Another failure of government and "the commons"

One of the reasons often advanced for large government is management of "the commons": things that supposedly don't work well as privatized spaces, that must be managed centrally "for the good of all". This is the command-and-control "solution" to the "Tragedy of the Commons."

In practice, though, the history of government management of commons is pretty poor. Again, for reasons I don't fully understand, the psychology of the masses is that they give a pass to this poor track record while imagining far worse management under a private system. I'm not sure where this myopia comes from. All I can do is continue to catalog the list of failures.

In this article, the FCC's opening of the electromagnetic frequency band currently occupied by broadcast television is discussed. I'm sure that most people have never considered whether the government's management of the "frequency commons" has been good: it just *is*, I get my television on my rabbit ears, and that's good enough. But it has it really been good? Is this opening up a sign that government management of the commons works?

Or is it the case that *this should have been done long ago*? As the article says

The television industry's shift from analog to digital broadcasts will leave "white spaces" -- that is, unused portions of wireless spectrum.

IOW: *digital* use of the spectrum is *far* more efficient than analog use.

And yet: due to government management of the commons, inefficient analog use of extremely important parts of the spectrum has been dictated by government policy for *far* longer than it needed to be, and is *still* dictated in other parts of the spectrum, e.g. the spectrum used for FM radio. There is no technological reason to hog the current FM radio spectrum for analog digital broadcasts, and doing so is actually suppressing many potential technological/product advances.

Digital broadcasts over the EM spectrum could work just like internet communication and cell-phone communication: in terms of "packets" that have "addresses" that allow multiple communications to go on simultaneously on the same "channel". (The TV/Radio equivalent for cell phones would be if each and every cellphone had its own band of the EM spectrum, a situation that would allow for, oh, approximately 100 people to have cell phones). The government's inefficient management of the broadcast TV and radio spaces have suppressed interesting technologies such as personalized radio (in which each person receives a separate "radio station"). Look for example how many programming choices Sirius/XM pack into a single frequency for an insight into how many more choices we could have.

The obvious approach to problems of "Tragedy of the Commons" is to avoid "commons" altogether, via division of the supposed commons into pieces that can be separately sold and operated privately.

Clearly, some situations lend themselves more easily and readily to "privatization" than others. As someone said to me recently when I suggested that *if* there's a "problem" that needs to be solved in "global warming/climate change", that rather than advocating the usual government-control "solution" to a "commons" problem, perhaps the solution is to get rid of the commons altogether: "you want to privatize air?" While I certainly don't accept clever soundbites as a substitute for actual logic and rationality, I'll give that some things lend themselves more easily to "privatization".

Having said that: I don't see the EM spectrum as one of them. Particularly in the digital age, there's arguably not even a "commons" since multiple parties can share the same frequency. But even before that, there's no reason that parts of the spectrum couldn't have been sold. Different frequencies largely are independent, and different geographic regions of a single frequency are largely independent (with the exception being at points on the boundaries). The frequencies could have been sold by a reasonable geographic distribution. If this had been done, it would have incentivized individual owners to most efficiently use their frequency, which would have encouraged solutions like the digital mutliplexing *long* before now.