Brookings Institute

[Commentary] While we’re engaging in a new assessment of technology’s transformative impacts, no one should leave aside tech’s most physically enormous influence: its big role in reshaping the nation’s urban geography. Scholars have for years suggested that tech might alter the city hierarchy. Most notably, Beaudry, Doms, and Lewis showed more than a decade ago that the cities that adopted personal computers earliest and fastest saw their relative wages increase the quickest.

Technological developments have continued to increase the importance of radio spectrum, with citizens, companies, and government users increasing their use of wireless-enabled services of all kinds, from smartphone apps to satellite navigation.

Since technology places limits on the coexistence of multiple radio systems, usage rights must be allocated among various competing uses. This Hamilton Project discussion paper describes the importance of moving toward a more economically efficient system for managing the use of wireless spectrum, and proposes concrete policy steps to move us closer to such a system.

In particular, it sets forth three pillars of a reformed policy regime:

1. Reduce ambiguity about the responsibilities of receivers to tolerate interference;
2. Reduce the drawbacks of excessive band fragmentation;
3. Move adjudication from the current ad hoc and politically charged process to a more fact-based procedure, either in the FCC and/or in a newly created Court of Spectrum Claims.

[Commentary] A founding principle of The Hamilton Project’s economic strategy is that long-term prosperity is best achieved by fostering economic growth and broad participation in that growth in a changing global economy.

One important way to fulfill the goals of this strategy is to encourage the efficient use of our nation’s resources to maximize economic growth and to foster innovation.

In this policy memo, The Hamilton Project considers the economic challenge of more-efficient assignment of wireless spectrum, which is critical to our modern information economy, as well as to national security, defense, and first responders.

[Harris is Policy Director of Hamilton Project; Kearney is Director of Hamilton Project]