It's well-written but I totally disagree. Coase's prescription of auctions is precisely the means by which the People have had huge portions of the spectrum hijacked by megacorporations that they, in turn, use to extract rents from the public, while we get some overcrowded crumbs for our own use.
This market-based analysis, which is typical, omits the factor of nearly complete regulatory capture, i.e. our reality.
> Coase anticipated that full, fair, well-informed evaluations would find that decentralized resource owners generally outperformed state diktat.
That omission is pervasive, as if "state diktat" is some force independent of these same resource owners.
The auctions pit average citizens individually against the resources of megacorporations. Obviously it’s no match, the outcome of that contest will inevitably be what we have now. The point I’m making is pretty simple which is merely that the public deserves way more unlicensed and amateur spectrum. The government serves the types of corporations participating in these auctions, to the exclusion of the People, so that’s probably not ever changing.
The point of any auction is to determine who 'deserves' what.
Your reversing cause and effect.
And it's not like every auction winner is guaranteed to make money, there are cases where they overbid and ended up losing money, to the benefit of the regulator, which is indirectly benefiting the taxpayer.
Which cause and effect am I reversing? Who deserves what is based on identity, i.e. citizen vs corporation, not money alone. So the auction determination of who deserves what, based only on money, is what is in some cases reversed.
>it's not like every auction winner is guaranteed to make money
Whether corporations made a sound business decision in the process of elbowing citizens out of their rightful resources while attempting to extract rents from them is beside the point. The damage to the People is done regardless.
It’s astonishing that corporations shouldn’t be able
to ride roughshod over the public and dominate all our resources unbridled? Shared by almost no one? Go look into the opposition to Citizens United. The idea that the government should be united with corporations which is what we have now is the real definition of fascism, supporting that is what’s astonishing.
You know an auction is literally people paying the public the most to use a shared resource, right? Whether they are people organized into a corporation or individuals bidding on spectrum, the end result is the same. The public got paid the most it could for publicly auctioned frequencies.
Well considering the U.S. Constitution remains unamended, it's a fact at least 25% of the electorate disagrees, so this is a provably false statement even in the worst case scenario.
