The LightSquared Mess Shouldn’t Count Against Coase

It seems there’s a new meme floating around DC: I’ve been asked from both sides of the spectrum rights polemic whether the Lightsquared/GPS situation proves that Coasian make-spectrum-property advocates are crazy because the rights seem to be pretty well defined in this case, and yet the argument drags on at the FCC rather than being resolved through market deals. I suspect the source is Harold Feld’s blog My Insanely Long Field Guide to Lightsquared v. The GPS Guys where he says:

For a spectrum wonk such as myself, it simply does not get better than this. I also get one more real world example where I say to all the “property is the answer to everything” guys: “Ha! You think property is so hot? The rights are clearly defined here. Where’s your precious Coasian solution now, smart guys?”

The “Coasian” position does have its problems (see below), but this isn’t an example of one of them. I think Harold’s premise is incorrect: the rights are NOT well-defined. While LightSquared’s transmission rights are clear, GPS’s right to protection – or equivalently, LightSquared’s obligation to protect GPS receivers from its transmissions – is entirely unclear. There’s no objective, predictable definition of the protection that’s required, just a vague generalities, built into statute (see e.g. Mike Marcus’s Harmful Interference: The Definitional Challenge).

LightSquared’s transmission permissions are in some sense meaningless, since “avoiding harmful interference” will always trump whatever transmit right they have, and there’s no way to know in advance what will constitute harmful interference. I believe that’s a fundamental problem with almost all radio rights definitions to date, and why I’ve proposed the Three Ps.

The “Coasian” position’s real important problems are on view elsewhere:

(1) While negotiation between cellular operators to shift cell boundaries show that transactions can succeed in special cases, there is no evidence yet that transaction costs for disputes between different kinds of service will be low, and thus that negotiations will succeed in the general case. Even if one can ensure that rights are well defined, it may prove politically impossible to reduce the number of negotiating parties to manageable levels since radio licenses are a cheap way for the government to distribute largesse to interest groups. This is most obvious in the case of unlicensed operation, but many licensed services such as public safety and rural communications also result in a myriad of licensees.

(2) The FCC’s ability and proclivity to jump in and change operating rules (i.e. licensees rights) in the middle of the game makes regulatory lobbying more efficient than market negotiation. This may be unavoidable given law and precedent. There is no way for today’s Commission to bind tomorrow’s Commission to a path of action; legislation is the only way to do that, and even statute is subject to change.

(3) A significant chunk of radio services aren’t amenable to market forces since they’re operated by government agencies that can’t put a monetary value on their operations, and/or can’t take money in exchange for adjusted rights. Nobody is willing to quantify the cost of a slightly increased risk that an emergency responder won’t be able complete a call, or that a radar system won’t see a missile, even if those systems have a non-zero failure rate to begin with. And even if the Defense Department were willing to do a deal with a cellular company to enable cellular service somewhere, it can’t take the Cellco’s money; the dollars would flow to the Treasury, so there’s absolutely no incentive for the DoD (let alone the people who work for it) to come to some arrangement.

Protection Limits are not "Interference Temperature Redux"

My post Receiver Protection Limits may have left the impression that reception protection limits are similar to the dreaded and ill-fated interference temperature notion introduced in 2002 by the FCC’s Spectrum Policy Task Force.

Receiver protections are part of the "Three Ps" approach (Probabilistic reception Protections and transmission Permissions - see e.g. the earlier post How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Interference, or the full paper on SSRN). While both the Three P and Interference Temperatur approaches share a desire to “shift the current method for assessing interference which is based on transmitter operations, to an approach that is based on the actual radiofrequency (RF) environment,” to quote from the first paragraph of the Interference Temperature NOI and NPRM (ET Docket No. 03-237), the Three Ps approach differs from Interference Temperature in four important ways:

1. The Three Ps focus on solving out-of-band, cross-channel interference, whereas Interference Temperature is concerned with in-band, co-channel operation

2. The Three Ps are used to define new operating rights, whereas Interference Temperature tried to open up opportunities for additional operations in frequencies allocated to existing licensees

3. The Three Ps do not grant second party rights, whereas Interference Temperature permits second party operation.

4. Three Ps rights are probabilistic, whereas Interference Temperature definitions are deterministic.

Receiver protection limits: Two Analogies

I argued in Receiver protection limits that there are better ways to manage poor receivers causing cross-channel interference problems than specifying receiver standards. Here are two analogies to sharpen one’s intuition for the most appropriate way to handle such situations.

Cities increase the salinity of rivers running through them, affecting downstream agriculture. However, the choices that farmers make determine the degree of harm; some crops are much more salt-tolerant than others. In order to ensure that farms bear their part of the burden, regulators have a choice: they can either regulate which crops may be grown downstream, or they can specify a ceiling on the salinity of the water leaving the city limits, leaving it up to farmers to decide whether to plant salt-tolerant crops, perform desalination, or move their business elsewhere. Limits on salinity protection are a less interventionist solution, and don’t require regulators to have a deep understanding of the interaction between salinity, crops and local geography.

Sound pollution is another analogy to radio operation. Let’s imagine that the state has an interest in the noise levels inside houses near a freeway. It can either provide detailed regulations prescribing building set-backs and comprehensive specifications on how houses should be sound-proofed, or it could ensure that the noise level at the freeway-residential boundary won’t exceed a certain limit, leaving it up to home-owners to decide where and how to build. Again, noise ceilings are a simple and generic regulatory approach that does not limit the freedom of citizens to live as they choose, and that does not require the regulator to keep pace with ever-evolving technologies to sound-proof buildings.

Receiver protection limits: a better way to manage interference than receiver standards

Radio interference cannot simply be blamed on a transmitter; a service can also break down because a receiver should be able to, but does not, reject a signal transmitted on an adjacent channel.

More on this topic in subsequent posts:

Receiver protection limits: Two Analogies (June 2011)
Protection Limits are not "Interference Temperature Redux" (June 2011)
The LightSquared Mess Shouldn’t Count Against Coase (June 2011)
Licensing radio receivers as a way to facilitate negotiation about interference (August 2011)
Incremental management of reception: When protection limits are not sufficient (February 2012)
Four Concerns about Interference Limits (May 2012)
Transmitter versus receiver specifications: measuring loudness versus understanding (July 2012)
Testimony: Harm Claim Thresholds (November 2012)
Receiver Interference Tolerance: The Tent Analogy (November 2012)

I have also written a two-page summary document, see http://sdrv.ms/ReceiverLimits.

The LightSquared vs. GPS bun fight is a good example of this “two to tango” situation. GPS receivers – some more so than others – are designed to receive energy way outside the allocated GPS bands which means that operation in the adjacent band due to a new service like LightSquared can cause satellite location services to fail. Without the LightSquared transmissions, there wouldn’t be a problem; but likewise, if GPS receivers were designed with the appropriate filters, they could reject the adjacent LightSquared transmissions while continuing to receive the satellite location signal and function normally. [1]

While the responsibility for interference is, in theory, shared between transmitters and receivers, radio regulation has traditionally placed the onus on a new transmitter to fix any problems that may arise. [2] As I will argue, receiver standards are an impractical response; limits on reception protection, formulated in terms of the RF environment rather than equipment performance, are preferable.

Too strategic to be true?

The cellular industry has been very vocal in calling on the FCC to allocate more spectrum licenses to satisfy the forecast demand for mobile data services. For two examples more or less at random, see this CTIA white paper, and the 4G Americas white paper “Sustaining the Mobile Miracle” (PDF).

On reflection, though, it strikes me as rather curious behavior for cut-throat competitors. More spectrum licenses won’t satisfy the insatiable demand for wireless data capacity any more than building highways reduces traffic congestion, and while it might make strategic sense, in the short term – and isn’t that all that really matters for listed companies, when all the rhetoric is said and done? – it means that the cellcos are giving up a wonderful opportunity to make money.

If the supply of spectrum licenses were fixed, and not increased by reallocation of other services to mobile wireless, then Economics 101 dictates that the price for wireless data would rise. (This is ignored in the forecasts; see e.g. my post Cisco’s Fascinating Flaky Forecast.) Operators wouldn’t incur the capital costs of lighting up new frequencies, and so their profits would rise – a lot!

On the other hand, if more cellular licenses were made available, the carriers would not only have to buy them at auction, but they would have to buy and install the infrastructure to use them. The price they could charge for wireless data service wouldn’t change much, and so their profits would go down, or at best stay flat.

All that said, though: these companies are much, much smarter business people than I am. I must be missing something. But what?

Perhaps this is all just a big CYA operation. When the inevitable demand crunch happens (with or without new cellular licenses, demand is set to outstrip supply), the operators will be able to blame the government: “Dear customer, it’s not our fault, we’ve been asking the government to help us give you the services you want, but they didn’t come through. We’re sorry, but all we can do to make sure that those who really need wireless services get them is to increase prices.”

“Quiet” doesn’t mean “unused”: The Downside of Under-defined Radio Rights

The FCC has promised to find and reallocate 500 MHz of radio frequencies to satisfy the burgeoning demand for high bandwidth mobile services such as video on cell phones. The idea, the hope, is that there are lots of unused bands to be repurposed. “Unused” is a tricky notion, though. I’ll take it to mean “radio quiet”: a radio energy detector doesn’t observe much if anything at certain frequencies, and the assumption is that a new service could transmit here.

Of course, nothing is as simple as that. Let’s assume that the services that actually operate in these quiet bands – and there are always incumbents, since every frequency has one if not many nominal users – can be found a new home, and that they’ll relocate. The harder problem is that a quiet band may not in fact be usable because of the equipment in neighboring bands. The LightSquared/GPS argument is a conveniently current example. The proposal to allow LightSquared to deploy lots of ground-based transmitters in a band where to date only satellite transmissions were allowed has caused shock and outrage among GPS users who claim that their receivers cannot distinguish between the LightSquared signal in the adjacent band and the satellite location signals in the GPS channel.

Since the FCC’s rules and precedents provide almost unlimited protection against "harmful interference" (a notoriously vague term) caused by new services, an incumbent is pretty much assured that it will be held harmless against any change. The situation is exacerbated because FCC licenses only specify transmission parameters and say nothing about the radio interference environment that receivers should be able to cope with. Radio receivers are thus designed and built as if their radio environment will never change; if a band has been quiet, none of the receivers in the adjacent frequencies can cope with more intensive use, since building in that protection costs money. (For complementary perspectives on this problem, and suggested remedies, see two short papers presented at a recent conference in Washington, DC: Kwerel and Williams, De Vries and Sieh.)

Thus, just because a band is quiet doesn’t mean that it’s unoccupied; it’s probably effectively occupied by the protection afforded to the cheap receivers next door that haven’t been required to, and therefore don’t, tolerate any substantial operation in the quiet channel. It’s as if the incumbent were a householder whose property used to be passed by track along which only ox wagons passed. She didn’t have to take any precaution against her dogs being run over by a wagon, such as building a fence, and this unlimited protection still holds even when the track is turned into an arterial road, holding passing vehicles completely responsible if a dog is run over.

Money could, but might not, solve the problem. Let’s say Tom Transmitter wants to deploy a new service
in the formerly quiet band, and that this would cost the incumbent neighbor, Rae Receiver, $300 million, either in lost revenue from diminished service and/or because of precautions such as new receiver filters that are needed to reject Tom’s adjacent band signals. If the benefit to Tom is big enough, if for example he could generate $500 million in profit, Tom could compensate Rae and still come out ahead. But how is the $200 million of potential gain ($500 million - $300 million) to be divided? This depends on Rae’s rights. If she has the right to prevent any operation by Tom (i.e. she can take out an injunction against him), she can demand essentially all his profits as a condition of operationlet’s say $499 million of his $500 million, whereas if she’s entitled to damages, she can only demand $300 million for actual losses. These are very different outcomes. Under an injunction, Tom’s incremental net profit is $1 million ($500 million - $499 million) and Rae’s is $199 million ($499 million - $300 million), whereas under damages, Tom’s net profit is $200 million and Rae’s is zero.

However, since the FCC doesn’t specify whether licenses are protected by damages or injunctions, Tom and Rae can’t begin to deal, since the legal basis of the negotiation is unclear. Tom will hope that he can get the whole $200 million incremental gain, and Rae will hope for it, too – a huge difference in expectations that will almost inevitably prevent the parties from coming to an agreement.

(There are further obstacles to reaching a settlement that I won’t go into here, such as uncertainty over what action by Tom actually constitutes damage to Rae due to ambiguity in the way FCC rules are currently formulated, and the freeloader/hold-out problems with negotiations involving many parties.)

What's to be done?

1. Any inventory of “unused” radio capacity should not only itemize radio quiet bands, but also the nature of the service and receivers next door, so that the cost of relocating, protecting or degrading the incumbent service can be estimated.

2. Any new licenses that are issued should specify whether they’re protected by injunctions or damages; this will facilitate negotiation.

3. Any new license should specify the receiver protection parameters the operator can rely on, and by implication what will not be protected.

4. Regulators should start retrofitting existing licenses to this new approach by specifying the remedy (#2) and laying out a timeline over which receiver protections (#3) will be dialed down from the current open-ended “no harmful interference” condition to more realistic and objective received energy levels.

The two page position paper I referenced above gives a quick introduction to these measures; for all the gory details, see the 15 page long version on SSRN.

Juggling Pipes: orchestrating scarce radio resources to serve multifarious applications

I concluded in Cisco’s Fascinating Flaky Forecast that the impending supply/demand mismatch in wireless data services presents opportunities for “innovations that improve effective throughput and the user experience”. This post explains one example: a software layer that that matches up various applications on a device to the most appropriate connectivity option available, mixing and matching apps to pipes to make the cheapest, fastest, or most energy efficient connection. (In academic terms, it’s a version of Joe Mitola’s Cognitive Radio vision.)

Peter Haynes recently prompted me to ask some experts what they thought the most exciting wireless technology developments were likely to be in the next decade. Mostly the answer was More of The Same; a lot of work still has to be done to realize Mitola’s vision. The most striking response was from Milind Buddhikot at Bell Labs, who suggested that the wireless network as we know it today will disappear into a datacenter by 2020, which I take to mean that network elements will be virtualized.

I don’t know about the data center, but from a device perspective it reminded me of something that’s been clear for some time: as a device’s connectivity options keep growing, from a single wired network jack to include one or more cellular data connections, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, UWB, ZigBee etc., as the diversity of applications and their needs keeps growing, from an email client to many apps with different needs including asynchronous downloads, voice and video streams, and data uploads, and as choosing among becomes more complicated, such as trade-offs between connectivity price, speed, quality of the connection, and energy usage, there is a growing need for a layer that sits between all these components and orchestrates all these connections. Can you say “multi-sided market”?

The operating system is the obvious place to do such trade-offs. It sits between applications and peripherals, and already provides apps with abstractions of network connectivity. As far as I know, no OS provider has stepped up with a road map “smart connectivity.” It’s decidedly not just “smart radio” as we’ve heard about with “white spaces”; the white space radio is just one of the many resources that need to be coordinated.

For example, one Wi-Fi card should be virtualized as multiple pipes, one for every app that wants to use it. Conversely, a Wi-Fi card and a 3G modem could be bonded into a single pipe should an application need additional burst capacity. And the OS should be able to swap out the physical connection associated with a logical pipe without the app having to know about it, e.g. when one walks out of a Wi-Fi hotspot and needs to switch to wide-area connectivity; the mobile phone companies are already doing this with Wi-Fi, though I don’t know how well it’s working.

That said, the natural winner in this area isn’t clear. Microsoft should be the front-runner given its installed base on laptops, its deep relationships with silicon vendors, and its experience virtualizing hardware for the benefit of applications – but it doesn’t seem interested in this kind of innovation.

Google has an existential need to make connectivity to its servers as good as it could possibly be, and the success of Android in smartphones gives it a platform for shipping client code, and credibility in writing an OS. However, it is still early in developing expertise in managing an ecosystem of hardware vendors and app developers.

The network operators don’t much end-user software expertise, but they won’t allow themselves to be commoditized without a fight, as they would be if a user’s software could choose moment-to-moment between AT&T and Verizon’s connectivity offers. The telcos have experience building and deploying connectivity management layers through orgs like 3GPP. Something like this could be built on IMS, but it’s currently a network rather than device architecture. And the network operators are unlikely to deploy software that allows the user to roam to another provider’s data pipes.

The chipset and handset vendors are in a weaker position since they compete amongst themselves so much for access to telcos. Qualcomm seems to get it, as evidenced by their Gobi vision, which is several years old now: “With Gobi, the notebook computer becomes the unifying agent between the different high speed wireless networking technologies deployed around the world and that means freedom from having to locate hotspots, more choice in carrier networks, and, ultimately, freedom to Gobi where you want without fear of losing connectivity – your lifeline to your world.” As far as I can tell, though, it doesn’t go much beyond hardware and an API for supporting multiple 3G/4G service providers on one laptop. Handset vendors like

Vendors like Samsung or HTC could make a go of it, but since network operators are very unlikely to pick a single hardware vendor, they will only be able to get an ecosystem up to scale if they collaborate in developing a standard. It’s more likely that they will line up behind the software giants when Google and/or Microsoft come forward with their solutions.

It is also possible that Cisco (or more likely, a start-up it acquires) will drive this functionality from the network layer, competing with or complementing app/pipe multiplexing software on individual devices. As Preston Marshall has outlined for cognitive radio,* future networks will adapt to user needs and organize themselves to respond to traffic flow and quality of service needs, using policy engines and cross-layer adaptation to manage multiple network structures. There is a perpetual tussle for control between the edge of the network and the center; smart communications modules will be just another installment.

* See Table 4 in Preston F Marshall, “Extending the Reach of Cognitive Radio,” Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 97 no. 4 p. 612, April 2009

Cisco’s Fascinating Flaky Forecast

Ed Thomas prompted me to have a look at Cisco’s recently published Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2010–2015.

The numbers are staggering: global mobile data traffic grew 2.6-fold in 2010, nearly tripling for the third year in a row; mobile video traffic will exceed 50% for the first time in 2011; and Cisco predicts that global mobile data traffic will increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015. Big numbers forecast by someone who’ll make money if they come true are always suspect, though. While the historical data are largely indisputable – and amazing – I think the forecasts are bogus, though in interesting ways.

Flags went up at the projection of 92% CAGR in mobile traffic growth over the next five years. From the scant details on assumptions provided in the report, I suspect the overall growth is driven (more than driven, in fact) by the growth in the number of users, not by increases in per-user usage. For example, Cisco predicts that the number of mobile-only Internet users will grow 25-fold between 2010 and 2015 to reach 788 million, over half of them in “Asia Pacific” (defined to exclude Japan).

Working back from their forecast data volumes and assumptions on user growth, however, suggests that usage per user (I prefer to think in terms of Megabits/second rather than ExaBytes/month) doesn’t increase over the study period, an in fact declines.



The growth in traffic thus hinges on the global user base growing to almost 800 million mobile-only users in five years, from 14 million today. That’s staggering, and to me implausible.

If nothing else, though, this demonstrates that using Cisco’s meganumbers don’t necessarily imply an impending bandwidth crunch doesn’t hold water. It doesn’t mean there isn’t going to be one, just that growth numbers don’t imply/require it, because they’re in large part driven by hundreds of millions of new users in China.

A more fundamental flaw is that the analysis is entirely demand driven. This was probably fine when Cisco was predicting wireline use, since there is so much dark fiber that supply is essentially unlimited. However, one cannot ignore the scarcity of radio licenses. We’re near the Shannon limit of the number of bits/second that can be extracted from a Hertz of bandwidth, and massive new frequency allocations will not show up overnight. An alternative is to reduce cell size and serve more users per cell by using smart antennas; however, such a build-out will take time. I don’t know how much extra traffic one can fit into the existing infrastructure and frequencies, but Cisco should at least have made an argument that this doesn’t matter, or that it can ramp up as fast as the demand.

While there may be spare capacity in China, there’s clearly a supply question in markets that are already halfway up the growth curve, though, like the US. Cisco ignores this. In North America they’re forecasting that the number of mobile-only internet users will go from 2.6 million to 55.6 million (!). It’s reasonable to assume that these most of these new users are in places that are already consuming a lot of capacity, and that one will need more radio bandwidth to deliver more data throughput.

Cisco is forecasting that throughput will go from 0.05 ExaB/mo to 1.0 ExaB/mo for North American users. That’s a factor of 20. It’s hard to see how you get there from here without massive reengineering of the infrastructure.

• One could get 2x by doubling available licenses from 400 MHz to 800 MHz; the FCC is talking about finding 500 MHz of new licenses for mobile data, but this is a pipe dream; if not in principle, then in the next five years given how slowly the gears grind in DC.

• The extra throughput isn’t coming from offloading traffic from the wireless onto the wired network; Cisco considered this, and is forecasting 39% for offload that by 2015. Let’s say they’re conservative, and it’s 50%: that’s just another 2x.

• Spectral efficiency, the bits/second that can be extracted from a Hertz of bandwidth, isn’t going to increase much. Engineers have made great strides in the last decade, we’re approaching the theoretical limits. Maybe another 50%, from 4 bps/Hz to 6 bps/Hz? Even an implausible doubling to 8 bps/Hz is just another 2x.

So by using heroically optimistic assumptions one can get an 8x increase in capacity – nowhere near that 20x Cisco is forecasting.



And last but not least, the forecast method ignores Econ 101: if demand increases with limited supply, prices will go up, and this will suppress demand. Not only does the study ignores supply, it also ignores supply/demand interactions.

Still, let’s stipulate that the demand forecast is accurate, and that grant me that supply is going to be constrained. The consequence is that there will be millions of screaming customers over the next few years when they discover that the promise of unlimited mobile connectivity cannot be delivered. The pressure on government will be huge, and the opportunities for innovations that improve effective throughput and the user experience in a world of scarcity (relative to expectations) will be immense. A crisis is coming; and with it the opportunity to make fundamental fixes to how wireless licenses are managed, and how applications are delivered.

Ways of Knowing

Reading St Augustine’s Confessions reminded me of the Buddhist tradition's three ways of knowing, or "wisdoms": experiential/mystical, cerebral/rational, and learning/textual. (The Pāli terms are bhavana-mayā paññā, cintā-mayā paññā and suta-mayā paññā, respectively.)What strikes me about Augustine is his depth in all three methods; most people seem comfortable in one or at most two of them.

People may debate at cross purposes because they use different approaches to understand the world. Someone who thinks about the world experientially will have difficulty finding common ground with someone grounded in logic, and both may belittle someone who defers to tradition or social norms.

When I shared this idea with Dor Deasy, she pointed out that John Wesley thought faith should be approached from four perspectives: Experience, Reason, Scripture and Tradition, which map to the three above if one combines Scripture and Tradition. According to Wikipedia, the Wesleyan Quadrilateral can be seen as a matrix for interpreting the Bible in mutually complementary ways: “[T]he living core of the Christian faith was revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason.”

Different personality types approach faith in different ways, though. Peter Richardson’s Four Spiritualities: Expressions of Self, Expression of Spirit uses the Meyers-Briggs personality inventory to characterize an individual’s bent. It may come down to brain physiology: I would not be surprised to learn that some people's brains are built in a way that predispose them to mystical experiences, while others are optimized for logic, or absorbing social norms.

Forging bits

William Gibson makes passing reference to the art and craft forging documents early on in Spook Country, telling about trips to second hand bookstores to buy just the right paper, and ageing credentials by carrying them around.

Nowadays, though, paper is optional. Checks can be deposited by snapping pictures of front and back and sending to the bank, and airlines scan pictures of boarding passes from your phone at the gate.

Paper credentials decentralize verification. When it's difficult to "call HQ" to check identity - which it used to be until very recently - the attestation had to stand on its own feet, carrying the full burden of authenticating not only its bearer but also itself. Nowadays a database look-up is instantaneous, and the database can not only produce the photo of the person making the identity claim, but can also track whether multiple claims are being asserted simultaneously in different places.

The locus of forgery thus moves from the edge to the middle: you don't hack the passport, you hack the passport database. With a suitably large investment in securing the center, it becomes harder for street freelancers to generate credentials as they go, "at retail". However, there is now a single point of failure, and a successful hack of the central database can generate an unlimited number of false documents. As always when moving from bricks to clicks, the upfront cost is huge, but the marginal cost is negligible.

The discretion of, and trust required in, the agent at the edge diminishes. When paper documents had to be checked, officers developed a feel for a fake by handling tens of thousands of them over years, and their instincts could tell them something was off long before the official notice came around. Not all of them were equally good, though, and a rookie might miss a dud that an old hand would see a mile off. Now the quality of authentication depends on the security and agility of the central repository; if it can be broken, or is slow to respond to an exploit, a hack that works will work everywhere, immediately.

One might therefore expect that digital spooks and their paymasters are working not only on building bit-bombs to disable infrastructure, but constructing trapdoors to facilitate the forgery of digital credentials. "Identity theft" is probably not the half of it; identity creation (and destruction) is much more valuable.

Law without Categories?

A recent New Scientist story about the descent of birds from dinosaurs (James O'Donoghue, Living dinosaurs: How birds took over the world, Section 2, Was archaeopteryx really a bird?, 08 December 2010; subscription required) contained this passage:

The real question is, where do you draw the line between dinosaurs and birds? Ask different palaeontologists and you will get subtly different answers. That is because the distinction is basically arbitrary, says Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China, who discovered many of the Chinese fossils [of feathered dinosaurs].

This is a common theme in biology: the boundaries between species are arbitrary. And yet we continue to think in terms of species, since categorization is such a strong human reflex.

Jurisprudence and regulation in particular is built on categorization, defining categories that determine the response to a particular situation. At the heart of current network neutrality argument is the question of whether  a company falls in "Title II" in which case a whole raft of  telecommunication regulation regarding common carriage applies, or "Title I" in which case they are much more lightly regulated.

However, as the analogy to biology illustrates, most interesting categories have fuzzy boundaries, making for a delightful amount of work for lawyers and lobbyists, but not necessarily helpful outcomes.

Taxonomies are backward-looking; they attempt to fossilize a reality but are constantly open to revision. (This necessity for revision undermines the certainty which category-based rules purport to offer since categories are less robust than they appear, necessitating the case-by-case interpretation which proponents of rules contend is the weakness of the alternative approach, principles-based regulation.) They evidently work well enough, though; they're pervasive. A paper by David Bach & Jonathan Sallet about VOIP regulation (The challenges of classification: Emerging VOIP regulation in Europe and the United States, First Monday, Volume 10, Number 7, 4 July 2005) explains the situation very well:

From a practical point of view, classification stands out because classifying different services is what regulators principally do. In an ideal world, one could just draw up rules for VOIP that address the aforementioned critical issues, keeping in mind the technology’s novelty and the substantial differences that exist between conventional circuit–switched telephony and innovative packet–switched VOIP. In the real world, however, a first step in the regulation of new technologies is usually to try to fit them into existing service categories, in part because those are the tools that regulators work with and in part because classification can provide shortcuts through complex regulatory problems. Alternatively, regulators may be inclined to ask whether VOIP service is "like" or "substitutable" for current services — an approach that may obscure technological achievement. Either way, much is at stake in these decisions.

Fitting VOIP into existing regulatory categories is not simply an administrative or technical act. Since categories are associated with distinct sets of rights and responsibilities that have distributional and market strategic implications, a large number of stakeholders have mobilized to affect the outcome. . . .

Unpacking the political economic dynamics of evolving VOIP regulation highlights a second, more analytic reason to focus on classification. The debate over how to classify VOIP represents the leading edge of the question whether regulatory classification is useful in a world of converging technologies. . . .

In the eyes of most regulators and industry observers, correctly categorizing VOIP provides a shortcut through regulatory uncertainty. Yet precisely this is the problem with classification. As policymakers almost reflexively ask how a new technology fits into existing categories, the underlying political and social objectives of regulation can get lost.

A behavioral alternative comes to mind: the regulations that should apply do not derive from the category into which an action falls, but from its consequences; in Bach & Sallet's terms, one needs to look to the political and social outcomes, not the inputs.

Not even a metaphor

Said Industry Minister Eric Besson, describing an upcoming auction of radio licenses in France, "These frequencies are of very, very high quality." What? How can a frequency, merely an attribute of electromagnetic radiation, be of high quality?

I’ve been inveighing against the misuse of spectrum metaphors for some time, but it took this quote to make me realize that the figure of speech at issue is really metonymy, not metaphor.

Metonymy is referring to something not by its name, but by something that is intimately associated with it (Wikipedia). Some examples:

The designers come up with the ideas, but the suits (worn by executives) make the big bonuses.

The pen (associated with thoughts written down) is mightier than the sword (associated with military action).

Freedom of the press (associated with the journalists and what they write) is an important value.

The White House (associated with the President and his staff) stood above the fray.

He bought the best acres (associated with the land measured in acres).

Both metaphor and metonymy substitute one term for another: metaphor by some specific similarity, and metonymy by some association. In spectrum language both are at work, for example in “Guard bands leave too many frequencies (or spectrum) lying fallow.”

Metonymy: Frequencies are associated with radio licenses

Metaphor: Radio licenses are like title to property

Metonymy: Property title is associated with the land to which it relates

Metaphor: Fallow land stands for any underused asset

Heresy as Diagnostic

Heresies, or more exactly, the arguments that lead to one perspective being labeled as orthodoxy and the other as heresy, are pulsing pointers to a religion’s sore spots, those questions of doctrine or practice that have multiple plausible but incompatible answers. Heresy seems to be a useful tool for analyzing a set of beliefs. (Any book recommendations gratefully received.)

I was drawn to the question of heresy by reading Augustine’s Confessions, and Peter Brown’s masterful biography, Augustine of Hippo (1967, 2000). For instance, comparing Augustine and Pelagius, he writes

“The two men disagreed radically on an issue that is still relevant, and where the basic lines of division have remained the same: on the nature and sources of a fully good, creative action. How could this rare thing happen? For one person, a good action could man one that fulfilled successfully certain conditions of behavior, for another, one that marked the culmination of an inner evolution. The first view, was roughly that of Pelagius; the second, that of Augustine.”

My guess is that the choice between solutions that leads to a perspective being labeled heresy is necessary for a consistent set of beliefs, but that something is lost when the choice is made. I’m reminded of Isaiah Berlin’s approach to conflicts of values, summed up thus by John Gray in an interview with Alan Saunders on the Philosopher’s Zone (Australian Radio National, 6 June 2009)

“ . . . the idea that some fundamental concepts of human values are intractable, rationally intractable, in the sense that first of all they can't be resolved without some important loss, and secondly reason is very important in thinking about these conflicts, and then being clear about what they are, what they're between and what's at stake in them. [E]qually reasonable people can come to different judgments as to what ought to be done, so certain types of conflict of value are intractable. . . . So this idea of a kind of fundamental and intractable moral scarcity if you like in human life, such that there have been and there will always be intractable, the conflicts of values, and we can resolve them more or less intelligently in particular contexts that can be more or less skillful and intelligent and reasonable settlements of these conflicts, but they can never be overcome or left behind.”

Such differences may point to a conflict between incommensurable world views. For example, in an article about “relativity deniers”, (Einstein's sceptics: Who were the relativity deniers?, New Scientist 18 November 2010, subscription required) Milena Wazeck explains,

"Einstein's opponents were seriously concerned about the future of science. They did not simply disagree with the theory of general relativity; they opposed the new foundations of physics altogether. The increasingly mathematical approach of theoretical physics collided with the then widely held view that science is essentially simple mechanics, comprehensible to every educated layperson."

I would not be at all surprised if there is at least something like this at play in the argument over climate change; opponents have been all but branded as heretics, and there is religious fervor on both sides.

Better Radio Rights

Demand for wireless services is growing relentlessly, but the ambiguous definition of rights and unpredictable enforcement has led to prolonged inter-service interference disputes that impede innovation and investment.

Silicon Flatirons organized a conference on this topic in DC a couple of weeks ago. The goal was to explore how radio operating rights could best be defined, assigned and enforced in order to obtain the maximum benefit from wireless operations. The event web site has links a fascinating set of position papers prepared by the panelists. There’s also a compendium that collects them all in one place (PDF).

Kaleb Sieh and I proposed (position paper, full paper on SSRN) an approach to radio operating rights based on three principles: (1) aim regulation at maximizing concurrent operation, not minimizing harmful interference; (2) delegate management of interference to operators; (3) define, assign and enforce entitlements in a way that facilitates transactions.

We argue that radio rights should be articulated using transmission permissions and reception protections, defined probabilistically (the Three Ps): transmission permissions should be based on resulting field strength over space and frequency, rather than radiated power at a transmitter; reception protections should state the maximum electromagnetic energy an operator can expect from other operations; both are specified probabilistically. This formulation of operating rights does not require a definition of harmful interference, and does not require receiver standards.

Since any initial entitlement point is unlikely to be optimal, the regulator should facilitate the adjustment of rights by: limiting the number of parties to a negotiation should be limited by minimizing the number of recipients, and enabling direct bargaining by effective delegation; recording a complete and current description of every entitlement in a public registry; stipulating the remedy (injunctions or damages) that attaches to an operating right when it is issued; the regulator refraining from rulemaking during adjudication; leaving parameter values unchanged after an entitlement has been defined, although values may be adjusted though bilateral negotiation between operators, and the regulator may add new parameters at license renewal.

Who gets the apple? Part II: A salty problem

Here's another analogy; one that includes a nod to dispute resolution. For those who know and/or love Coasian economics, it's our old friend the pollution example, though tweaked to be radio interference in light disguise. It's also, incidentally, based on a true story I heard from someone who works for a large county's water district.

Imagine a city along a river, and a downstream farming community. Urban development results in more salt being added to the river; increased salinity can reduce crop yield. Salty water is therefore analogous to radio interference between transmitters (cities) and receivers (farms).

The harm to crops is a shared responsibility, though. For example, the city can reduce the amount of downstream salt by building a water treatment plant, and the farmers can accomodate more salty water by changing crops - spinach will be fine on water that's too salty for celery.

Let's imagine that a Federal Crops Commission (call it the FCC2) is responsible for managing this problem. It might instruct the city and farms to "coordinate" to find a solution to the problem, with a guideline that water may not be "too salty". As in the apple example, this is difficult to do without defining what counts as too salty, and who bears the responsibility for salinity.

If the FCC2 limits the salt the city can dump in the river like the FCC controls radio emissions, it would specify a ceiling of, say, 5 tons of salt per day - with a rider that the resulting water can't be "too salty". This is not very helpful to the farmers, however, since they care about the resulting salinity; seasonal variations in water volume or the salinity entering the city limits from upstream affect the resulting salinty. It doesn't help the city either, since it can't be sure how much water treatment capacity to build; 4 tons/day of salt might still turn out to be too much if the farmers downstream choose salt-intolerant crops and/or the river level is too low.

Matters are compounded when the city and the farming community fail to reach agreement, and go to the FCC2 to resolve a conflict. (They have nowhere else to go, since the courts defer to the FCC2 as an expert agency to decide what "too salty" means in a particular case.)

Neither side can predict what the outcome of the FCC2's deliberations will be, since it doesn't always decide the merits of individual cases in isolation. It has many proceedings before it at any given time; for example, the FCC2 might be pushing the farmers to get organic certification, and negotiating with the city about the rezoning of agricultural land for urban development. The solution the FCC2 negotiates between the city and the farmers might encompass all these other matters, not only making the result of the salinity dispute unpredictable, but failing to establish a precedent that others might use later.

A better approach would be for the FCC2 to regulate the resulting salinity in water leaving the city (to, say, 5 ppm), remove any mention of "too salty" from its regulations, and provide a way for contending parties to get a specific case resolved efficiently. It might give the farmers the right to stop the city water plant releasing water into the river if the salinity exceeds 5 ppm (leading to a negotiated solution, where the city might pay the farmers' coop $300,000 to raise the limit up to 10 ppm in dry months), or if there are too farmers to negotiate with individually it might choose a liability regime (leading to a court-imposed payment of say $30/acre if salinity exceeds 5 ppm and some farmers sue the city).