The Economists' Contribution to Radio Spectrum Access: The Past, the Present, and the Future

For a long time, most economists supported a strong governmental control of spectrum access. This changed radically to a widespread advocacy of auctions, which in time became a new orthodoxy and began to exhibit problems. More recently, counter-arguments have been made for unlicensed and free spectrum access. This, too, will hit practical obstacles. This paper predicts as the next step a move to a user-fee-based access based on emerging technologies that eliminate the need and justification for frequency exclusivity.