Dr. Snider is research director for the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Program and he says he has good reason to believe that his paper, titled "Spectrum Policy Wonderland: A Critique of Conventional Property Rights and Commons Theory in a World of Low Power Wireless Devices," could change the terms of the current debate. (A summary of the paper appears on the next page).

In recent years that debate has centred on three models: command-and-control, property rights and commons. It is now widely accepted that the command and control approach to spectrum management is an ineffective way to allocate a valuable finite resource but agreeing its replacement remains a bone of contention. This challenge is acknowledged in another key spectrum report produced this year by the Digital Age Communications Act (DACA) Project’s Working Group on New Spectrum Policy on behalf of the US based Progress and Freedom Foundation. “While there is widespread dissatisfaction with the legacy command-and-control systems, there is considerable disagreement (even within this working group) over what should replace it,” it says. The working group included some of the biggest US names in spectrum policy Gerald Faulhauber, Thomas W Hazlett and Lawrence J. White...

Speaking to Policy Tracker about the purpose of his paper, Snider said that his biggest hope was to get the US municipalities behind him in shifting the management of unlicensed property rights from the federal government to state and local governments.

‘In addition to the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (TPRC), spectrum policy community, I’ve been discussing the piece with high-tech and municipal lobbies as well as some key spectrum engineering academics. There seems to be widespread agreement that the US hasn’t done enough – and Europe is even worse - with unlicensed underlay technologies such as Ultra Wide Band...’

For the complete article -- as well as Policy Tracker Newsletter's summary of Snider's recent report, "Spectrum Policy Wonderland" -- please see the Policy Tracker website.