Re: [wg-c] Eureka?

[Milton Mueller <mueller@syr.edu>]

Speaking as someone who has been studying rf
allocation issues since 1982, private companies can and do "allot" bands.
Just look at New Zealand's "management rights," which are sold at auction
and give the owner the right to issue their own "license rights."

Rf licenses can be sold or transferred in most countries.
Just look at the worldwide market in cellular properties.

The trend in the more advanced economies is to permit greater private
flexibility in the use of spectrum, while maintaining control of interference.
The idea is to let the market, not regulators, decide how many channels
are devoted to specific services.

I don't see why TLD administration can't follow that pattern.
Because the name space has far fewer technical constraints than
spectrum, it is much easier to do this in domain names.

Legal regimes are of course defined by government.
No one disputes the need for this. That is ICANN's role.

The issue is, does the root space administrator facilitate a competitive
market with open entry, or not? Does it create an open market in the
resource, or not?

If you and others believe that some TLDs should be "owned" by ICANN
and operated as non-profit shared registries, there is plenty of room
to try that idea out. If others want to try a different model, why not?

I have yet to hear a single substantive reason why various approaches
cannot be combined.

Javier wrote:

> At 21:14 11/08/99 -0700, you wrote:
> >On Wed, Aug 11, 1999 at 10:42:14PM -0400, Milton Mueller wrote:
> >> Javier:
> >> Radio spectrum is far more "scarce" than domain name space.
> >> Yet governments around the world license private commercial businesses
> >> to give them exclusive control of a range of frequencies.
>
> A radio frequency would be equivalent to an IP address or a domain, not the
> managment of the space. It is a resource, and it is planned by a regulator.
>
> Private companies do not allot radio frequencies to others.
>
> javier