Camels of the sky

According to The Register Ofcom is planning more spectrum sales, and it is going to do it in a way that could not be bettered. You see it is planning to establish property rights over the airwaves. The chunks of spectrum will be sold permanently to the buyer who can then lease or resell them onwards if whatever they are planning does not pan out, the only restriction is that any signal from that chunk of spectrum cannot interfer too much with the signal in the chunks of spectrum around it. This is great, a recipe for the limited resource of the radio spectrum to be used in the most efficient manner possible and be able to be quickly and easily repurposed to meet peoples changing needs.

The only cloud on the horizon is our government over the water as the EU has other ideas. It would prefer to take over control of the spectrum itself so that it can dictate what it is used for in an attempt to pick winners. Somehow the GSM standard managed not to be a total camel, but the chances of that happening twice are just laughable. More likely there will be spectrum dedicated to TV for mobile phones and other useless boondoggles.

Where we an independent nation this wouldn't matter of course. We would create property rights for spectrum and the EU wouldn't. If the EU's camel breeding programme did manage to turn out a couple of successes then whomever owned the relevant slice of spectrum would cash in by letting it be used for whatever that was. If the EU picked losers however it wouldn't matter and that piece of spectrum would be used for something that was useful. However we are not independent, we are very much part of the EU empire so what our local government and its regulators decide is irrelevant as they will just be overruled by their imperial masters.