We have an incumbent regulatory system of command-and-control regulation. Both property and commons models are radical in comparison.
Spectrum is not "used up" so you can't optimize "spectrum use." We are optimizing communications. We are optimizing the capacity of users to communicate information without wires.
There's no reason for policy to aim at a false target (how we use spectrum best) imperfectly correlated to the actual target (how we communicate best).
The three parameters for analysis:
1. Equipment cost (total cost of the system)
2. Displacement cost (how many communications, and of what value)
3. Transaction/administrative cost
Equipment cost: In a commons model the machine capitalizes the value of free communications over the lifetime of the equipment. Most of the capital investment is done at the edges.
Property models make equipment optimized by pricing usage, but you get more investment in the network.
Displacement: In the old model, every communication displaced another communication. Destabilized by the declining cost of processors and the theoretical changes to Shannon's Law and multiuser information channel.
Instead of adding infrastructure to gain capacity, we should add users. The question is how to design equipment such that users add capacity Processing gain and cooperation gain mean that there is no fixed "amount of spectrum" necessary for communication. One can't define the displacement effect independent of the configuration of the actual devices involved, their geography and the actual devices potentially displaced.
In a commons model, there is value in investing in very good receivers, but in a property network, there is no such incentive, since ...