Intellectual Property Law

Remarkable: white spaces

By Susan Crawford

The news today in Washington is astounding.  I’m here at Reagan National and I just heard two plane-bound congressmen promise one another that they’d be back on Wednesday to go at it again.

Some people would like to auction off the television white spaces (sample filing here).  They’re claiming that the US Treasury would get another $10 to $24 billion from such an auction.

That assertion is based on some completely wild (and counter-factual) assumptions - the high power levels that anyone would need in order to be interested in buying these licenses would mean that most of the white spaces would be off-limits because of interference caused to existing broadcast operations.  And the white spaces aren’t contiguous, so who would want to invest in them?

There’s a very strong and well-worth-reading paper from the New America Foundation making these points:  There Is No Windfall in the White Spaces.

On the other hand, making the white spaces available on an unlicensed basis could have real benefits for rural broadband connectivity and innovation generally.  According to a New America Foundation paper, “Unlicensed use of the DTV white space would increase broadband subscribership by 15 percent over ten years, particularly in rural and inner city areas which are currently under-serviced and which would benefit from mesh network technology facilitated by unlicensed spectrum.”  So let’s hope the current financial crisis doesn’t get used as an excuse to sell off the white spaces - that would be as shortsighted as refusing to rescue the financial system as a whole.

Remember the wireless microphone people, and the Very Large Houses of Worship that use wireless mics and don’t want to be interfered with by other devices using the white spaces?  Well, it may be that most of this wireless mic use is itself unlicensed and therefore currently unauthorized.  A petition filed this past summer said that there were at least 400 times more illegal wireless microphone services in use than there were licenses on file with the Commission  That’s remarkable.

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on September 29, 2008 (boomark / email).