lies, damned lies and then statistics (and then PR campaigns by telecom companies)
1. Spectrum is charged for because:
a) if you give it away for free it will be like asda giving away free waterbaloons.. I have no use for them, but I will take 2 million of them please, to keep in my shed, forever, without using them (or giving some away or whatever.. they were free.. I don't feel obliged to use them). Also can I please have half the available spectrum allocated to then never use again?
b) it raises money for government / raises money that the government can chose how the country should spend.
2. This is better than the alternative, because although it pushes up prices a bit, it means that the goods (in this case wireless spectrum) are obtained only by those that are willing to use it.. no one will pay good money for spectrum that they are not going to use (unless they have very very poor management practices). its an even better idea to charge rent for it, because then, if you no longer need the spectrum then you can stop renting it... no need to keep paying for gym memberships that you don't use.. like if there was a gym with only 10 places at any given time.. and the memberships were free.. and the 10 current members never went, but also never canceled their hoarding of the memberships because they were free.. or they had just paid a lump sum up front for them, so they really had no reason to ever stop hoarding and never doing anything else with them?
3. This will drive up prices: companies and corporations are constructs that are created / allowed to exist because they provide goods and services to the population. In stead of the state supplying all our needs and requesting all the work to be done this function is passed on to legal entities (companies/corporations) who then supply a service/goods and that the population then pay them for. they are allowed to make a profit doing this, but is taxed to skim some of that money off for the government to spend on services that they deem inefficient to be ran by companies (fewer and fewer these days, good bye royal mail). Companies and corporations do what makes them the most money: If a specific outcome is preferred (better services?) then through taxes and tarrifs the palying field can be altered so that the best economic outcome for these legal entities also happen to be the one where the population gets better services.
a) if you make it more expensive for these companies to deliver services/goods to the population then they will have to charge more for those services. simple.
b) for the population it is better to have a service that works, even if it is slightly more expensive to make it more efficient (so that our telecoms companies aren't all providing 1g services, while hoarding spectrum, because there is no incentive to invest to do stuff with that spectrum)...
c) compare that with a service where we pay inflation increases, that never improves and never has to improve, like a theoretical british telecom who have a monopoly on landlines and don't see anything wrong with keeping the old switched telephone network exactly as it is for another 200 years (exageration - even under BT monopoly there was innovation.. just very slow)
4. taxes and tariffs designed to improve competition and innovation should be plowed back into lowering general taxes for corporations/companies/individuals. This is rarely done, governments generally like to spend money, and are not usually interested in increasing the purchasing power and prosperity of their country by lowering taxes. In stead it will be spent on spent on invented projects which sometimes pay off in terms of improving society, and sometimes are just wasted.
5. It is a good thing that offcom has done this. in the long term if will benefit us as consumers. it is a bad thing that the government will missuse the money raised from it.
6. Most people fail to see how all these things are connected, and companies/offcom/the government can therefore pretend that these issues are onesided... like telecoms convincing the population that what they really want is a a lower priced service that stays the same and where they (telecoms) don't have to invest anything to improve anything ever again :)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
