I think we’re making different assumptions about the nature of government. Please read
http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2008/05/willie-sutton-a.html to help understand the difference. I subscribe to the public choice theory of government, but I suspect you subscribe to the market failure theory.

Yes, this problem has been created by government intervention in the first place, and libertarians (for whom I do not speak except for myself) tend to want to see that intervention removed and not replaced by something potentially worse. On the other hand, you’ve got undesirable starting conditions to deal with, but given that the government has done a bad job so far, expecting government to fix it is faith-based governance (if you do the same thing and expect different results, you’re not rational.)

Of course we’re choosing between options here. My comment to Doc, which you’ve reaffirmed, is that libertarians will reject government intervention of the sort Doc is seeking. They will take an innovation-killing market equilibrium over an innovation-promoting intervention, because they believe in the Schumpeterian instability of those equlibria and are radically skeptical of interventions. That’s the problem. (Well, the problem is also the small matter of ignoring that the initial conditions are not a market solution to begin with.)

Stuff and nonsense! Nobody thinks that the market solves all problems. What libertarians believe is that the market solves most problems better than politics. You might be able to find a few problems which politics solves better than the market … however if you give them the power to fix those problems, politicians won’t be able to stop using it to solve other problems for which politics is inappropriate.

When all is counted, political solutions are worse than market solutions. The only helpful role the government has to play is to keep violence at bay.

When the agency gets closely involved in operational details, they generally blow it.

One area where they’re pretty weak is in the resolution of ambiguities in regulations. There were questions about how to measure the power level of UWB devices with different on-off duty cycles, and that lead to a split in the standards community between approaches dictated by different interpretations of the regulations.

I’d like to see an experiment where the FCC licenses some spectrum to a standards organization, which then draws up a standard and a certification process such that any conforming device can use the spectrum with no further licensing. This would actually be the best way to approach the White Spaces, as the approach put forward by Google et. al. is unworkable.

My appeal to Libertarians goes straight to the open source/free software readership of Linux Journal, where I would have posted this if I hadn’t run into a temporary glitch there.

The problem for many Liberatarians is that “the market” too often takes the form of giants that gobble up a category leaving no choice but that between Tweedle Godzilla and Tweedle King Kong. This can be rationalized as “okay” as long as government isn’t involved, but the virtues of entrepreneurship, choice and other forms of free market goodness tend to be prevented when only the Grendels rule a category.

This is why I tried with that argument to appeal to Dynamists as well. Seems to me the Net is a perfect environment for dynamistic activity out the wazoo, as long as the monopolists and duopolists, and their running dogs at the FCC, don’t work to prevent it.

And right now the Net as “delivered” via crippled services (blocked ports, hard-to-get IP addresses, prohibitively high “business” pricing, bandwidtch subordination of the Net to live TV) prevents more business than it supports. Thus few of us know, as long as our “bandwidth” keeps going up by small measures, what we’re missing.

I like the interconnection angle. It seems somewhat similar in its virtue set (though not its focus) to what Bob Frankston has been saying about connectivity as the superordinate virtue.

I like scaling back the FCC’s purview in general. We’ve lived too long in 1934.

Thus. Monopolies should be regulated. Possible options: a) higher corporate tax and\or b) “be fair to others”. So the government could take money from telcos operation on the urban areas and cover the cost of building the internet infrastructure for the countriside

What do you think?