> My point was just that wireless communications do rely on public assets in a significant way.
The whole point of auctions is to take a public asset, compensate the public through the auction process, then make it private and let the market manage it. At that point, it's no longer public.
> From a carriers perspective, they benefit from the existing inefficiencies and besides, it would deeply cut into their monopoly profits .
The cellular carriers aren't monopolies. At three or four major carriers, there's much more competition in that space than in, say, the search engine space or the consumer operating system space, or in the mobile operating system space. Moreover, those profits are what motivate companies like AT&T and Verizon to spend tens of billions of dollars a year investing in infrastructure that becomes rapidly obsolete.
Look at our other public infrastructure. It's decrepit. Amtrak still has lots of cars built in the 1970's. Our power companies are running century-old coal fired power plants. You think there's the public will to spend tens of billions of tax dollars each year upgrading cellular infrastructure to keep pace with technology? Once public wireless infrastructure was built, it'd be a fight to just get enough funding to merely maintain it, the same sort of fight we're having with rail infrastructure, water infrastructure, etc. E.g. many rail routes are slower today than they were in the 1960's, because the infrastructure has been allowed to deteriorate.
There's an article on the front page today that gives you an idea of how well our "other utilities" work: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/swim-swam-swum ("Grzybowski sampled again, and the C.F.U. count in the river exceeded 24,196, the highest possible measurement. 'Pretty much raw sewage,' he reported.")
The whole point of auctions is to take a public asset, compensate the public through the auction process, then make it private and let the market manage it. At that point, it's no longer public.
> From a carriers perspective, they benefit from the existing inefficiencies and besides, it would deeply cut into their monopoly profits .
The cellular carriers aren't monopolies. At three or four major carriers, there's much more competition in that space than in, say, the search engine space or the consumer operating system space, or in the mobile operating system space. Moreover, those profits are what motivate companies like AT&T and Verizon to spend tens of billions of dollars a year investing in infrastructure that becomes rapidly obsolete.
Look at our other public infrastructure. It's decrepit. Amtrak still has lots of cars built in the 1970's. Our power companies are running century-old coal fired power plants. You think there's the public will to spend tens of billions of tax dollars each year upgrading cellular infrastructure to keep pace with technology? Once public wireless infrastructure was built, it'd be a fight to just get enough funding to merely maintain it, the same sort of fight we're having with rail infrastructure, water infrastructure, etc. E.g. many rail routes are slower today than they were in the 1960's, because the infrastructure has been allowed to deteriorate.
There's an article on the front page today that gives you an idea of how well our "other utilities" work: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/swim-swam-swum ("Grzybowski sampled again, and the C.F.U. count in the river exceeded 24,196, the highest possible measurement. 'Pretty much raw sewage,' he reported.")