I am a pretty extreme libertarian (kind of a nutter) and keep getting worse at it, but the reason that argument is flawed is that it assumes anyone can own electromagnetic radiation frequency. It is in the same realm as owning wavelengths of visible light. It is a government construct, like patents and copyright, that have no natural scarcity to them, but has scarcity and ownership artificially implied, enforced through violence of law.
The real free market answer is that electromagnetic radiation is information, and you can generate whatever frequency of it you want, and you assume the markets would naturally orient themselves to not interfere devices. I absolutely think that would happen - any competitive entity trying to sell radio devices would have it in their best interest to collaborate across the market to make sure device manufacturers don't interfere, but it isn't at the threat of violence but at the promise of profits people would restrict their band usage. The market would inherently optimize radio usage for the best use case of consumers, to optimize their returns. The inherent competition would create incentives to innovate ways to use less bandwidth, different bands, etc.
That is the free market approach to radio. If you start your argument with "the government starts out owning this unlimited concept of frequency" it immediately is flawed.
That utterly misconceives both the nature of spectrum and the nature of property rights. Every property right is a government construct--there are no such things as "rights" in the statute of nature.[1] As far as property rights go, spectrum is much more like land than it is like information. A property right in land isn't just ownership of the physical dirt--it's ownership of a particular piece of a finite coordinate space. Similarly, spectrum rights are ownership of a particular piece of a different coordinate space (the tuple (x, y, z, f)).
People can read multiple copies of a book without interfering with each other, but people can't transmit on the same frequencies without doing so, just as they can't farm the same land without interfering with each other.[2]
> The real free market answer is that electromagnetic radiation is information, and you can generate whatever frequency of it you want, and you assume the markets would naturally orient themselves to not interfere devices.
That's like saying that the real free market answer is to not enforce rights in land, and let the free market work out how to coordinate various uses of land so they don't interference with each other. There is a name for that, it's called the tragedy of the commons.
[1] A "right" deconstructed, just means some legal relationship which the government will enforce on your behalf through violence. Without government, there is no one to enforce rights, and the concept is utterly meaningless. A deer can't invoke its "right to life" when a wolf kills and eats it.
[2] This is an imperfect analogy for various reasons, but more or less true at a very coarse level of granularity.
While I do think natural rights are nonsense, I disagree that property rights are necessarily a government construct. There are other institutions regulating property, with enforcement provided by the civil society.
It seems like there would be an incentive for people to build radio jammers or other ways of generating interference. They would then use those jammers to extort legitimate broadcasters - pay me $1 million or I'll ruin your broadcast. Since the extortionist has equal rights to broadcast waves, broadcasting the interference is not illegal. How would you prevent this?
Radio broadcasts - ie electromagnetic radiation - is energy projected onto other's people's property. The libertarian view should be that it can limit person's A right to project energy if it interferes with the rights of person B. If I aim powerful lasers at my neighbors house, the government has the right to intervene. If I broadcast loud sound waves at 3AM, the government has the right to intervene. If I want to build a nuclear plant that might irradiate everyone in my town if things go wrong, the government has the right to regulate it. When I broadcast radio, I interfere with the ability of others to broadcast and listen to radio. The purpose of a government is to mediate these conflicts. Predictable mediation requires establishing clear ownership rights.
Maybe you could argue the government should have allowed spectrum to be homesteaded, rather than purchased, but the end result would be similar.
Extortion is a crime and tortious interference with business is tortious interference with a business. I don't think either of those would magically vanish upon the abolition of spectrum regulations.
One thing that bugs me about pro and contra libertarian debates is that both sides do something similar: imagine a kind of Year Zero world in which somehow all laws have been shipped to /dev/null. It's a dumb debate to have. Angels waltzing with strawmen on the head of a pin.
I'm not going to speak on all libertarians, but my world view is pretty much that you can possess finite scarce goods and call them "yours" (things made of atoms) but with things that aren't scarce (information, once produced, is not scarce - we can easily order electrons to represent the super-majority of the information space) it is tragic and wrong to try to restrict them.
Radios are scarce, but the range and ability to produce electromagnetic waves at certain frequencies is not scarce with said radio. Computers are scarce, but digital information is infinitely reproducible and millions of people will send you a copy for free (see: torrents). This kind of stuff shouldn't be limited or restricted by artificial government constructs.
There is a difference between having a finite resource and artificially calling it "yours" and taking an infinite resource and calling it "yours. Ownership is a fundamental human right - to possess scarce resources you can call your own. It is only recently the bulk of humanity has had this right. I don't think it should be anyones right to own an infinite resource like an idea, though.
Personal opinion. I write software and think trying to sell per-copy instances of infinite information is ridiculous. In computer terms, it is the flip side to the free software coin that makes open source a whole. If you distribute a black box you shouldn't be able to try to force people to treat it some certain way, after all, you freely gave it the first time, anyone else can do with it what they will.
I still target open source since I'm not a dick and don't like giving someone a black box, but that is tangential.
Economists talk about rivalrousness and excludability when classifying goods.
Rivalrous means that, to the extent I am using or possessing some good, you are not. Excludable means that I can, as a seller, prevent you from using it without payment.
Most physical goods are rivalrous and excludable. I can keep an icecream to myself and while I am digesting it, you are not. The icecream truck can prevent you taking one without payment. This meets the definition of what people usually think of as "private property".
Radio waves are rivalrous but not excludable; economists call these "common goods". These lead to -- you guessed it -- the tragedy of the commons, where individually optimal decisions lead to globally suboptimal outcomes.
Commons can't work unless agents agree to constrain themselves, or are made to constrain themselves. The former can happen by agreement, the latter by regulation.
In the case of radio, regulation has been the standard model because of the nature of the usage. Voice and vision have been analogue and the human nervous system is a poor demultiplexer, so they needed bands to themselves. Similarly for many other applications (radar, for example) , the amount of information put through a certain band has historically been low but the value high. So: regulation.
Wireless networks are an example of a commons managed by agreement; or perhaps managed by emergent phenomena. Each wireless node blindly follows some simple rules (such as randomised exponential backoff) that, in practice, make a shared medium largely usable.
> I'm not going to speak on all libertarians, but my world view is pretty much that you can possess finite scarce goods and call them "yours" (things made of atoms)
If ownership only extends to things made of atoms, then you'd agree that it's totally okay for me to build my house on your land so long as it hovers an inch over the dirt and grass that comprises your ownership. Otherwise, you're claiming ownership of an incorporeal thing--the geographic coordinates that encompass not just your land but the space above it.
> Radios are scarce, but the range and ability to produce electromagnetic waves at certain frequencies is not scarce with said radio.
Ownership of spectrum is not a monopoly on the right to produce electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency. It's a monopoly on the right to invade certain areas of space with electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency. The FCC doesn't care what frequencies you transmit on in a lead-lined room on your own property.
> Radios are scarce, but the range and ability to produce electromagnetic waves at certain frequencies is not scarce with said radio.
I work in the wireless networking field, and my and my coworkers' experience is actually the complete opposite in high-density environments: there is an abundance of radios, and a scarcity of frequency.
Which, BTW, is one of the reasons wired networking consistently outperforms wireless - you have one and only one transmitter (in a full-duplex connection) on a given medium.
The peak throughput in any region of space in terms of wave density is limited, but one of the reasons your coworkers are probably experiencing such scarcity is due to artificial constraints on the market.
Frequency would be scarce in highly concentrated areas in an open-frequency region, but it would be less so than if you artificially restricted access. What would naturally follow is that the demand would distribute itself (within the realm of possibility, ultra low and high frequencies have either range or bandwidth disadvantages that make them ill suited for, say, digital packet signaling).
I also wonder what kind of innovation you might see in an open band environment in terms of wifi - if you weren't limited to the few bands of 802.11, maybe routers would pop up that dynamically enable multiple transmitters (like how a modern router would have multiple antennas to transmit in parallel, maybe you would see many-hundred low power antenna radios to interface with devices over the largest clear possible frequency range available?)
They won't have to. The market would naturally have big players find it in their best interest to organize spectrum interference around their usage, and would avoid ranges used by other big consistent players in a region. The average consumer should barely see any change, besides variable range on their devices as other hardware comes up and goes down in a frequency band they use.
But for use cases that require consistent signaling, or really high throughput, enabling radios that utilize vast swaths of frequencies in parallel can increase the throughput.
I am a pretty extreme libertarian (kind of a nutter) and keep getting worse at it, but the reason that argument is flawed is that it assumes anyone can own electromagnetic radiation frequency. It is in the same realm as owning wavelengths of visible light. It is a government construct, like patents and copyright, that have no natural scarcity to them, but has scarcity and ownership artificially implied, enforced through violence of law.
So are coal and land and money. All property is a government construct. Stop pretending otherwise.
I only support the violent maintenance of a singular kind of ownership, which is of scarce goods and resources which can not be replicated at, or at near, no cost, and whose transferral requires the giver lose while the receiver gains.
It is why I consider myself libertarian and not anarchist. Besides the fact I also think, like how Communism turned out, what we think in theory and what we do in practice are in conflict because people are still human and often do, even in selfish terms, illogical things.
I am a pretty extreme libertarian (kind of a nutter) and keep getting worse at it, but the reason that argument is flawed is that it assumes anyone can own electromagnetic radiation frequency.
Nobody owns a frequency, they have the right operate on that frequency.
It is a government construct that have no natural scarcity to them
The electromagnetic spectrum does have natural scarcity, due to interference. Have you ever had trouble getting a strong WiFi signal due to neighboring WiFi? You experienced electromagnetic spectrum scarcity. Now, you are probably going to jump in and argue that if only the government didn't constrain WiFi to 2.4GHz, there wouldn't be any scarcity. The problem is, there is still very much a finite amount of useable spectrum, and in fact a lot more of it is in use than you realize.
I already did, but electromagnetic spectrum is not scarce. You can cheaply, easily create radio waves, the radio might have scarcity, but the waves it produces are infinitely reproducible by a recipient, easily copied, and easily reproduced. They can be encoded as information, and conveyed as such, without losing any information, and reconstructed cheaply elsewhere.
You can not "take" someones radio wave and rob them of its possession, because when they broad cast it anyone could receive it, and if you are taking enough action to "block" its transmission you are violating many other scarce goods rights like invading their property.
All the other things you listed are scarce, not easily replicated, and taking of them means the other party loses because they are inherently scarce goods. Almost anything made of atoms is scarce, and anything made of electrons or photons is not, because as a property of the universe that made of the latter can be easily replicated for almost no effort but the former takes significant effort to reproduce from modern resources.
In the same vein, if you steal the radio, I no longer have it. If I broadcast on a frequency, I am not robbing you of your ability to use it, but it generates interference. If both parties have benevolent intentions (and in the absence of such, one can prosecute the other for sabotage and extortion for using hostile interference in the same vein that a company "owning" spectrum can sue someone for using it at all) then it is in their best interests to collaborate and mitigate the interference they impose on one another.
If they have no other option, it is not fit for a state to violently prevent one from using an infinitely reproducible resource while the other gets exclusive control over its usage.
Would you be ok with the sale of the visual light spectrum? Both radio and visible light are electromagnetic radiation. Doesn't it sound absurd to have the luminance of purple light the exclusive property of some corporate entity?
Here is another thing - the consumer electronics used in the US that are under these byzantine laws about spectrum usage are not operating in a global vacuum. They are bootlegged across India, China, and other nations that don't necessarily have rigorous spectrum laws in place that are enforced. These places self organize (with bumps and issues) into using radios without the need for control of what frequencies of electromagnetic radiation you can generate.
Because interference is traffic congestion, not me ripping the road out of the ground and hauling it away on a truck. If a frequency is busy, you just get noise and reduced range. The difference is that you don't have as many independent protocols running through the air as you do on the streets.
You can still use it, but your usage is diminished. On the electric grid, there is a peak voltage the line can feed to all recipients before it is maxed out and can't provide more juice. If I am on the grid with you, I'm diminishing the maximum power you can take off a sufficiently strained grid. It isn't stealing from you to use it though, and in the case of power there is very little litigation about people consuming too much electricity (from what I know).
There's no litigation over taking too much power from the grid because the grid is clearly owned by the power company, and they get to tell you what you're allowed to do with it (within the limits imposed by regulations). If the grid were simply a free-for-all the way you're proposing radio spectrum should be, things would be quite different.
The real free market answer is that electromagnetic radiation is information, and you can generate whatever frequency of it you want, and you assume the markets would naturally orient themselves to not interfere devices. I absolutely think that would happen - any competitive entity trying to sell radio devices would have it in their best interest to collaborate across the market to make sure device manufacturers don't interfere, but it isn't at the threat of violence but at the promise of profits people would restrict their band usage. The market would inherently optimize radio usage for the best use case of consumers, to optimize their returns. The inherent competition would create incentives to innovate ways to use less bandwidth, different bands, etc.
That is the free market approach to radio. If you start your argument with "the government starts out owning this unlimited concept of frequency" it immediately is flawed.