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Mathew Ingram notes that Google is continuing its campaign to use television "white spaces" for Internet connectivity, a promising concept that hasn't panned out so far. I think the most interesting tidbit in Ingram's post comes from an interview with Richard Wiley, the guy who chaired the committee that developed what became the current digital television standard. Ingram says Wiley told him that one of the broadcasters' criteria for the new standard is that it use as much spectrum as possible. That sounds backwards, but it made sense for the broadcasters, because they knew they'd have to give back any spectrum they didn't use. And it's consistent with past experience; we've written before about the broadcasters' spectrum-hoarding tendencies.

Perverse incentives like this are an inevitable consequence of the FCC's Soviet-style process for assigning spectrum usage. As long the uses for spectrum are decided by fiat by the FCC, current licensees are going to play these kinds of games to ensure they get the biggest slice they can, even if they waste spectrum in the process. A better way to handle the transition (and still a good idea today, for that matter) would have been to give the broadcasters a fixed spectrum allocation and then allowed them broad flexibility on how to use it—including the right to lease or sell unused portions to third parties. That way, if they found a way to transmit television signals with less spectrum, they would have been able to lease out the unusued portions to third parties who could put it to more productive use.

In addition to promoting more efficient spectrum use in the short run, putting more spectrum on the market (as they're doing in the UK) would have positive effects on the overall telecom market. By driving down the price of spectrum it would make it easier for new firms to get into the wireless market. So far, the relatively small number of licenses that have been put on the market has allowed incumbents to snapped them up and keep out new entrants. Putting more spectrum on the market would make this strategy a lot more difficult to pull off.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

Over at the Technology Liberation Front, my co-blogger Adam Thierer discusses the trade-offs between platform competition and standardization, a subject Mike has written about in the past. Adam explores the mobile phone and console markets, and points out that the proliferation of incompatible devices has created real costs for developers who want to build on top of those various platforms. He makes some good observations, but I think he's missing the importance of reverse-engineering in resolving the dilemma he identifies. If a platform is proprietary, then we really do face a trade-off between standardization and competition. But open, flexible standards allow both: many firms can offer competing products, but they all work together because they're all designed for a common platform. Moreover, if the standard is well designed, the competing products can offer a wide variety of different features, and the standard can grow and evolve over time as vendors propose and adopt new extensions. That's the story of the web, for example, which features both competition and interoperability. The standard has evolved organically, as various vendors proposed and adopted new standards and often adopted those of their competitors.

The question, of course, is how to reach this "sweet spot" of an open, flexible, and universal platform. Sometimes (as with the web) we just get lucky, and the designer of the initial standard has the foresight to make it open and extensible. But when that doesn't happen, and it often doesn't, the next best hope is reverse engineering: a company (e.g. IBM) develops a proprietary platform which achieves popularity and is then reverse-engineered by competitors, transforming it into a de facto open standard. The modern PC platform isn't really controlled by anybody, although Microsoft and Intel have more influence than most other vendors. And because nobody controls it, it's both fiercely competitive and highly interoperable.

Because reverse engineering is so important in transforming closed standards into open ones, we should be especially worried about laws that stand in the way of that process. I've written before that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is one such roadblock. For example, one would expect companies to be working hard to reverse-engineer Apple's iTunes-iPod ecosystem in order to sell iPod clones. We might expect the emergence of a de facto open standard around Apple's platform, with a variety of iPod clones and drop-in iTunes replacements. Unfortunately, in part because the DMCA limits the reverse-engineering of FairPlay, Apple's DRM technology, few vendors have attempted this. Hence, the DMCA is helping to perpetuate the competition-versus-standardization dilemma Adam laments.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.