I think the whole post boils down to only this: Craig Birkmaier wrote: > On the other hand, if you allocate spectrum to a > service, and create a marketplace to determine the > instantaneous cost of buying access to that service, > you eliminate much of the inefficiency and > gerrymandering that occurs with our current system. Oh? Then explain why AT&T, a "service" by your definition, was broken up, and why the baby bells that emerged are on their way to becoming the same thing as the original monolith. I don't think that creating monopolies is necessarily the right answer either. Not to mention how the telephone companies that originally offered a "service" want to get into TV distribution, and how cable TV companies have already gotten into offering telephone service. The technical arguments on spectrum utilization are the same, whether a single monolith operates the OTA frequencies, or whether separate independent companies do. Use IEEE 802.16 as an example of a very flexible RF-based scheme, just to prove this to yourself. In essence, WiMax does something very much like combining ATSC, DVB-T, and DBS under one umbrella (in terms of the different modulation schemes and distribution models it supports). So in practice, any RF "utility" that offers service to a large variety of appliances will end up having to create many different channels, with different capabilities, perhaps dynamically changing these channels at different times of day. On a smaller scale, individual broadcasters could do the same thing. And entities like USDTV can aggregate some parts of the spectrum run by the individual broadcasters, to create a hybrid between your single monopolistic "utility" and the existing broadcaster model. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.