More Wrangling Over White Spaces

Today, Ars takes a look at the recent political battle over “white spaces” – those gaps in the electromagnetic spectrum between television channels. Drew Clark offers an excellent history of the white space conundrum here. The NAB is adamantly against white space use, while the White Space Coalition (including Google and Microsoft) want to treat the spaces as unlicensed spectrum, free for anyone to use. A resolution appears unlikely any time soon. As my colleague Ryan Radia has pointed out, all of this rent-seeking behavior would be avoided if the spectrum were not centrally-planned.