Currently, spectrum in wireless networks is allocated using a property based scheme. This solves the problem of interference by providing coordinated access to capacity for users of multiple technologies at the cost of fixing the available capacity for each technology area. Recently, architectures have been proposed that use a cooperative strategy for capacity allocation. These have the advantage of increasing available capacity with the number of users. The author believes that cooperative wireless networks could be created that provide capacity that scales proportional to the number of users. In addition, a cooperative wireless network would have increased options with respect to Metcalfe's Law, the number of pairwise transactions that could occur would grow as N**2, and Reed's Law, the number of groups that could be formed would grow as 2**N.

The author argues that the scaling of capacity available in wireless networks indicates that spectrum does not behave like ordinary property and requires a different commons based allocation and coordination regime one that encourages cooperation among users in order to increase available capacity. No obvious regime exists today. However, the current Internet regime for wired communication was formed from 25 years of innovation in an open and experimental environment. The resulting regime differs significantly from the previous regime that grew under the control of the telecommunications provider. The author calls for the development of a cooperative wireless network regime by starting with an open and experimental regime that encourages cooperation much the same as the starting point for the current Internet regime for wired digital communications.

This paper is a summary of an Aspen Institute sponsored in-depth roundtable session, written from the perspective of one informed conference observer (Bollier). The participants are leading thinkers in the many complex areas this paper covers (economics, systems theory, human behavior, human futures, information technology evolution, etc) and are listed on page 57. A selection of their key insights shared in the paper are listed below:

A "push" economy is geared towards mass production, anticipating consumer demand, and routing resources to the right place at the right time, to create standardized and mass produced products. By contrast, a "pull" economy is based on open, flexible production platforms that are used to orchestrate a broad range of resources. Instead of producing standardized products, "pull" model companies are demand-driven, and assemble products in customized ways that serve specialized or local needs, usually using "rapid" or "on the fly" processes.

Several global corporations are moving towards "pull" methods, and away from "push" models; ie., Toyota, Dell, Cisco, Li & Fung. These companies employ different variations of Value Network models, that share information about overall network performance and best practices for serving specialized needs, among hundreds or even thousands of partner companies that make up the network. This creates an intra-network knowledge commons. Some companies also work closely with Open Source Software projects, thereby expanding their "pull" network, and expanding their knowledge commons into a broader Open Commons via Open Source Software project contributions. Thus, "pull" business models also tend to be Network Value-Increasing, and Commons-based business models as well.

"Pull" models can also be platforms for creating "increasing returns dynamics." This is due to "pull" models being based around loose and flexible networks that are already configured to scale as growth occurs. So, growth does not incur the huge overhead costs in administration that "push" models must contend with. Pull platform key characteristics include modular and loosely-coupled networks, open channels that better harness the passion and commitment of innovation communities. "Pull" platforms also will tend to influence public policy with regards to education and innovation, as more companies tend to gravitate towards the "pull" models.

The areas where "push" models tend to succeed in business are in areas where people do not know what they want, and prefer to shop from pre-made selections (Ikea, Home Depot). However, there are even "pull" models to found here, in the form of user-driven innovation, such as mountain biking, extreme skiing, hot rodding, etc. In these pro-amateur niches, customers don't necessarily know what they want, but do want to be a participant in the "pull" network that creates the product.

How do you tax a product that is made in 23 different countries? "Pull" models are going to change the way that governments create policy as more companies gravitate toward them. This will influence laws about intellectual property, education, taxation and more.

"Pull" economies are not just centered around finding creative ways to "outsource/offshore jobs" away from one place and to the places where "labor" is "cheaper". Successful "pull" models have encouraged and aided "insourcing", where more jobs are created, for instance in the United States by "foreign sources (a total of 7 million cited by this paper), than are out sourced (a total of 600,000+ cited by this paper). This is because pull models seek out, not just the "cheapest" labor, but the best ways to add value to the production networks. So, they can scale to many participants around the world, regardless of local labor costs, to find the best participants needed for specific specialized productions.

The social dynamics of "pull" models are highly centered around creating relationships of trust, sharing knowledge, and close cooperation among network participants. In "pull" models, non-market value creation (tacit knowledge, intangible value) is generally steered towards a commons-based model. A commons is used as a "collective governance regime for managing shared resources sustainably and equitably." Many of these commons are made possible by networked information technologies (the internet).

Bollier suggests that "if online commons are going to be useful to business, companies will need to do more work to develop protocols for identity and reputation management". This is because the use of the commons is based around trust. It also due to the need for ways to measure qualitative value in intangible assets beyond money, like knowledge, individual performance and value multiplication, and network wide performance/value multiplication.

Roundtable participants also noted that "pull" models will pose challenges to current education regimes that are centered around training people to participate in "push" economies. One of the participants mentions that " Computers, software tools, and Internet resources make possible some radically new styles of learning. By using pull-based systems, students can function much like businesses in the pull environment: They can access resources they don't control and put themselves into flows of activity, rather than just building inventories of static, objectified "knowledge."

Anticommons property is defined to be a class of property in analogy to the commons in classical economic literature to explain some of the failures and difficulties in the transition from communist to market economies. Multiple owners have privileges in a resource in a commons. The overuse of that resource has been described, notably by Hardin, as the tragedy of the commons. Heller defines an anticommons property as a scarce resource in which multiple owners have the right to individually exclude others from its use, and no one has an effective privilege of use. Stalemate results in the , the underuse of a property.

Heller examines a paradox in Moscow after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Storefronts remained empty even though the economy was growing and there was demand for consumer goods. In contrast, street kiosks in front of them filled with goods and customers.

He maintains that the phenomenon is due to a tragedy of the anticommons, an underuse of scarce resources due to the allocation of multiple new owners with the rights to exclude others from its use.

He compares the distribution of rights in commercial property (previously owned by the state with overlapping bureaucratic stakes) with other types of properties (e.g., individual apartments, communal apartments, and street kiosks.) In the latter cases, sometimes legal but more often brutally questionable means of resolving rights disputes results in more widespread use of resources in the absence of appropriate legal recourse.

While Heller devotes most of his attention to the underuse of commercial property in Moscow and other cities in the former Soviet Union, the notion of the anticommons has implications in the distribution of environmental and intellectual property rights.

Anticommons property may emerge in developed markets wherever new property rights are being defined. This can occur when new technologies make possible uses of, for example, intellectual property and environmental rights, unanticipated by the previously existing legal mechanism.

Once anticommons property appears, it is difficult to remedy the situation either through markets or subsequent regulation. Rather, Heller argues that care must be taken to avoid the accidental creation of anticommons property when new property rights are being defined by conveying core bundles of rights rather than multiple rights of exclusion.

The “second enclosure movement” attempts to put fences around the intellectual commons of ideas and facts in a manner analogous to the enclosure and transfer of property rights from the public to the private sphere during the first enclosure movement in England that fenced off common areas between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. A new way of thinking about the public domain, the intellectual commons, is needed to combat the negative impact of this trend.

Limits on intellectual property rights are being eroded by specious arguments about the need to protect against piracy and to encourage innovation. Historically there was a sense that any grant of intellectual property rights, effectively a state granted monopoly, was to be strictly limited in term. In fact, the erosion of those historical limits through legislation and extensions of intellectual property protections like business method patents, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and patents on the human genome can be argued to decrease the possibilities for collaborative creation traditional in domains as varied as science, law, education, and music.

The first enclosure movement can be viewed as a “revolution of the rich against the poor”, it was justified by the incentives it offered for large-scale investment, for the control it offered over exploitation, and for the efficiency of exploitation of resources. It was said to “avoid the tragedies of overuse and underinvestment,” a conclusion that is subject to some debate.

The second enclosure movement is the similar much more recent application of intellectual property law to “the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind”: things that were formerly thought of as either common property or uncommodifiable are being covered with new, or newly extended, property rights.

Advocates of the second enclosure argue that the extension of property rights is essential to create incentives to invention. Opponents point to the restrictions and bottlenecks on innovation and, in the case of the human genome, the claim that it is the “common heritage of humankind belonging to everyone.”

Dangers:

• Propertization is a vicious circle. Once something is made private it’s hard to take it back.
• To enclose the intellectual commons requires throwing away or restricting the characteristics of the Internet that made it so effective a force for innovation.
• The arguments for enclosure are analytically unsound and often based on the vested interests with financial abilities to sway lawmakers.

The notion of intellectual property has had critics through its history: Jefferson was concerned with the state creation of unbounded monopoly. He felt that intellectual property rights might be necessary, but should not be treated as natural rights and should be strictly limited in term.

The concept of public domain as applied to intellectual property is a relatively recent construct. Copyright is a system designed to feed the public domain providing temporary and narrowly limited rights. The public domain is “a commons that includes those aspects of copyrighted works which copyright does not protect.”

The Internet expanded rapidly because its core protocols, TCP/IP and HTML, are open.

A global network transforms the nature of creativity by introducing new ways of collaborating: examples include the free software and open-source software movement.

The free software and open-source software movements may serve as models for thinking about alternative ways of dealing with intellectual property which encourage collaborative innovation while offering creators the ability to distribute their inventions for financial gain. These movements stand squarely on intellectual property: they build on a living ecology of open code where the price for participation is a commitment to make incremental innovation part of the ecology.

Lessig defines a commons as “a resource that is free. Not necessarily zero cost, but if there is a cost, it is a neutrally imposed, or equally imposed cost.”

The General Public License (GPL) of the open-source software movement encourages continuing improvement by making source code for software and its modifications available for members of the community. Continuous, peer-monitored improvement is encouraged without violating individuals’ rights to distribute products for financial gain. Presumably the best solutions are adopted by the community.

Boyle proposes using the concept of “public domain” for intellectual property, a relatively recent term in legal discourse, as a rallying point for combating the erosion of the intellectual commons in much the manner that the concept of the “environment” was used to create a coalition of disparate self-interests.

There is a class of “shareable goods” that systematically have excess capacity relative to the needs of their owners. The use of these goods is more efficiently harnessed and allocated through sharing relationships rather than secondary markets. These rival material resources are beginning to be shared in the production of both rival and non-rival goods. Examples include car-pooling and the pooling of excess processing capacity of personal computers connected to the Internet for decomposed computations in a variety of domains.

Social sharing and exchange among individuals who are strangers or weakly related is an underappreciated modality of economic production that should exist alongside price-based and firm-based market production and state-based production. The sharing of physical goods is analogous to the sharing of labor in peer production (e.g., open source software).

The goods that are amenable to sharing are “lumpy.” They deliver utility in discrete packages rather than continuously. Thus an automobile used in carpooling is purchased with a fixed number of seats; a PC has certain processing power, memory and storage. They have enough capacity to satisfy their owners, but more than is often needed. Shareable goods are also of “medium granularity”: granularity is a measure of the cost relative to the demand for them in and the wealth of a society. A locomotive or passenger plane is large grained virtually everywhere. An automobile or PC is mid-grained in the United States, but large grained in Bangladesh. Thirty years ago, computers were large grained all over the world. These goods are thus are large enough to satisfy the needs of their owners and inexpensive enough that one person can justify putting a unit into service given his ability and willingness to pay for it. They have an overcapacity on a aggregate basis.

The motivations to share are often altruistic, but may also be financial or offer some other non-financial reward (e.g., access to high occupancy vehicle car pool lanes in the case of ad hoc ride sharing systems.)

The provision of services through sharing is more efficient than traditional markets because of negligible transaction costs and the benefits of more direct information exchange: the needs of the end consumers are communicated more directly than in traditional markets.

The analysis of the economic efficiency and value of shareable (physical) goods has implications for legal and legislative policy in other areas such as intellectual property and wireless communication.

Current policy analysis, legal decisions, and legislation often disregarding and/or ignorant of the economic and social value of shareable goods, has tended to defend existing market-based production and distribution in support of increasingly outmoded centralized, capital intensive, industrial models of distribution (as opposed to production) of cultural media. These limiting decisions incorrectly assume that the role of market production is fixed rather than technologically contingent.

How shareable goods are treated through legal, regulatory, and legislative policy has potentially crippling or conversely encouraging impact on the architecture of multi-media devices, communication networks, power distribution systems and on the production of cultural goods.

Definitions

The commons is a general term for shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest. Studies on the commons include the information commons with issues about public knowledge, the public domain, open science, and the free exchange of ideas -- all issues at the core of a direct democracy.

Common-pool resources (CPRs) are natural or human-made resources where one person's use subtracts from another's use and where it is often necessary, but difficult and costly, to exclude other users outside the group from using the resource.. The majority of the CPR research to date has been in the areas of fisheries, forests, grazing systems, wildlife, water resources, irrigation systems, agriculture, land tenure and use, social organization, theory (social dilemmas, game theory, experimental economics, etc.), and global commons (climate change, air pollution, transboundary disputes, etc.), but CPR's can also include the broadcast spectrum.

Issues

Whenever a group of people depend on a resource that everybody uses but nobody owns, and where one person's use effects another person's ability to use the resource, either the population fails to provide the resource, overconsumes and/or fails to replenish it, or they construct an institution for undertaking and managing collective action. The common pool resource (CPR) can be a fishery, a grazing ground, the Internet, the electromagnetic spectrum, a park, the air, scientific knowledge. The institution can be a body of informal norms that are disseminated by word of mouth, enforced by gossip or religious stricture, and passed from one generation to another, or a body of formal written laws that are enforced by state agencies, or a marketplace that treats the resource as private property, or a mixture of these forms. In the real world of fishing grounds and wireless competition, CPR institutions that succeed are those that survive, and those that fail sometimes cause the resource to disappear (e.g., salmon in the Pacific Northwest).

Elinor Ostrom's founding role in the evolution of an interdiscipline of cooperation studies grew from her challenge to currently accepted wisdom about institutions for collective action, her careful inductive examination of empirical studies of common pool resource management, and her insistence on interdisciplinary analysis. The dynamics she uncovered in her research - seven principles common to most successful, enduring common pool resource arrangements - are the starting point for anyone who wants to know how careful theoretical and experimental work can provide practical guidance for policy.

"The word commons originally denoted pastureland treated as a common resource, where individual herders were free to graze their sheep or cattle. The land can support a limited number of grazing animals. The temptation to graze more than one's share is a rational strategy for an individual herder. But if all succumb to the same temptation, the grass ceases to grow and the value of the pasture to everybody disappears."

In a 1986 lecture, Elinor Ostrom challenged the inexorable inevitability of Hardin's tragedy, noting that the situation described in Garrett Hardin's classic 1968 paper "The Tragedy of the Commons" has "the same underlying structure as the decision facing each prisoner in the so-called Prisoner's dilemma game." She also wrote:

"The Prisoner's Dilemma game has fascinated scholars in many fields. The paradox that individually rational strategies lead to collectively irrational outcomes seems to challenge a fundamental faith that rational human beings can achieve rational results. In the introduction to a recently published book, Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation, Richmond Campbell explains the "deep attraction" of the dilemma".

In her 1986 lecture, Ostrom emphasized the connection between the tragedy of the commons and the Prisoner's Dilemma game, but had the scientific curiosity to inquire whether tragically locked-in Prisoner's Dilemma strategies actually constrained human choice in all cases where humans have documented their use of common pool resources - she shrewdly understand that the cases in which people overcame the barriers to collective action are as important as the cases in which they fail:

"Scholars and government officials presume that all participants in situations with the structure of a PD game are necessarily trapped in the structure of the situation; as prisoners are trapped in their cells, participants are themselves trapped in their own mental apparatus. I shall argue that the structure is conceptually and methodologically necessary for analysis, but not an empirical necessity. The inability of participants to change the structure may be an empirical reality in some situations. It is not an empirical reality in many situations, however."

Ostrom argued from well-documented cases of informal institutions that had evolved into formal if localized arrangements, sometimes lasting for centuries, that groups could evolve effective institutions without externally coercive authority - if they could solve the "common set of problems." The design principles that Ostrom extracted from cases of successful CPR management turned out to be missing from most of the cases of failed CPR management she investigated - evidence that these design principles are clues to solutions to the problems preventing collective action in many instances. Ostrom argued forcefully that neither direct intervention by the state nor total privatization are necessary for people to evolve successful institutions - although state-provided courts lower the costs of creating the institutions, and the market value of well-managed CPRs provides strong incentive to create, agree, and maintain such arrangements.

Conclusions

Ostrom claims that "all efforts to organize collective action, whether by an external ruler, an entrepreneur, or a set of principals who wish to gain collective benefits, must address a common set of problems." These problems are "coping with free-riding, solving commitment problems, arranging for the supply of new institutions, and monitoring individual compliance with sets of rules." Ostrom found that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the following design principles:

1. Group boundaries are clearly defined.
2. Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.
3. Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4. The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.
5. A system for monitoring member's behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.
6. A graduated system of sanctions is used.
7. Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.
8. For CPRs that are parts of larger systems: appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

Currently, regulatory policy in the digitally networked environment is being used to replicate the current mass media structure in which individuals are passive consumers obtaining information and content from a few commercial producers. In this paper, Benkler provides legal, regulatory, and technological examples of how the mass media producer-consumer model is being reproduced at the content, logical, and physical layers of the digitally networked environment. At the content layer, intellectual property rights are used to legally deny uses that purely provide for public discourse. At the logical layer, owners of the logical layer are allowed to design that layer to protect the use of their content even for uses that are privileged by law. At the physical layer, the FCC has gone in two opposing directions by both created a commons of digital spectrum and perpetuated the current broadcast system with the allocation of digital spectrum. And in cable broadband, providers cite "technical reasons" for creating a system that provides significantly larger downstream capacity than upstream capacity and that technically prohibits customers from becoming users by hosting servers that serve up content in both cases perpetuating the mass media producer-consumer model.

But people want to be users as is evidenced by the Internet and the fact that people using telephones have spent more than on "newspapers, magazines, broadcast cable, and movies combined" in order to participate in communication. Users consume information but also rework information and send it to others (or produce new information). The Supreme Court's view of the First Amendment has repeatedly upheld the notion of users in that it provides for "robust debate, diversity of viewpoints, and individual expressive freedom" as opposed to the view that it provides a technical rule against regulation as regulation. At the same time, mass media has become technically, economically, and legally entrenched and government regulation seeks to counteract the potentially ill-effects on the intent of the First Amendment. The reality is that mass media provides very few individuals or organizations with access to communication pathways, and hence without regulation and maybe in spite of it, it is possible for this reality to inhibit the intent of the First Amendment.

Benkler calls for regulatory policy to move away from providing better service to consumers and towards enabling use and that consumption, production, and exchange of content is the purview of users - a move from the mass media producer-consumer model to an information commons. Today, technologically through the digitally networked environment and through appropriate regulatory policy, it is possible to develop a system in which individuals are free to participate in the consumption, production, and exchange of information - an information commons. Such a system would provide the intent of the First Amendment as regulatory policy today seeks to provide in spite of the realities of the mass media producer consumer model. However, such a system is not guaranteed and is not without regulation and therefore appropriate regulatory choices must be made at all levels (physical layer, logical layer, and content layer) to ensure a commons.

The traditional framework of the organization of economic production includes two modes of production: individuals order their productive activities either under the direction of managers at firms, or as individuals in markets following price signals. Free Software is one example of a broader social-economic phenomenon that Benkler calls 'commons-based peer production', a new, third mode of production in digitally networked environments. In order to explain the emergence of this third mode of production Benkler augments the traditional production framework. Because of the highly variable nature of human expertise, and given a pervasively networked information economy, commons-based peer production has advantages over the two traditional forms of organization. The paper concludes with a discussion of the problems of motivation, loss of motivation, and integration in peer production enterprises. Benkler concludes that (1) "Given a sufficiently large number of contributions, direct monetary incentives necessary to bring about contributions are trivial." and (2) "Peer production is limited not by the total cost or complexity of a project, but by its modularity, granularity, and the cost of integration."

The paper concludes with a discussion of the problems of collective action and how they are solved in the absence of property and the presence of high transaction costs of monetary compensation. Relevant factors include the fact that the resource being produced (information) is non-rival, that problems are divisible into a fine level of granularity, the ability to provide integration (quality control and handling of contributions) in a socially acceptable manner, that the pervasively networked information economy provides access to a large number of potential contributors, and the willingness of contributors to accept non-monetary rewards.

Benkler posits that understanding peer production in the same framework as the mainstream economic theory of organizations could explain the emergence of commons-based peer production. The mainstream economic theory of organizations says that individuals organize into firms whenever the cost of achieving an outcome is greater using a price system. Peer production emerge whenever the cost of peer-based production is lower than either market-based or firm-based production. Property rights emerge whenever the value of a resource is such that its utilization through a property-based appropriation offsets the cost of implementing and enforcing the property rights regime. Commons emerge when the cost of implementing a property regime is higher than the opportunity cost of the property. Market and firm based production can be divided into property based production and commons-based production. Peer-based production fits well into the framework with plenty of examples of both property based production (e.g., Xerox's Eureka) and commons-based peer production (e.g., free software, academic science, Wikipedia).

The emergence of peer production is tied to a pervasively networked information economy. Commons-based peer production has systematic advantages over market and firm based production when (1) the object of production is information or culture, and (2) the physical capital necessary for production is widely distributed. Both of the advantages of peer production are a function of the variability of human capital. First, commons-based peer production has an advantage of having a lowest cost of determining who is the best person for a given task (Benkler calls this 'information opportunity cost'). Second, it has an advantage of allocation efficiency where large groups of potential contributors interact with large groups of resources in the search for new tasks. That is, the practice of firms -- and to a lesser extent markets -- of securing access to limited sets of contributors and resources through contracts and property entails a systematic loss of productivity.

Benkler addresses the problems of motivation, loss of motivation, and integration in peer production enterprises. Benkler concludes the following:

• "Given a sufficiently large number of contributions, direct monetary incentives necessary to bring about contributions are trivial."
• "Peer production is limited not by the total cost or complexity of a project, but by its modularity, granularity, and the cost of integration."

Two kinds of actions represent threats to motivation (1) (the most important) unilateral appropriation by an individual or group of the project and (2) some behavior affecting the intrinsic value of participation for contributors (e.g., failure to integrate a contribution). Free-riding is a common demotivating action in commons. Since information is non-rival, free-riding is a non-issue so long as the pool of contributors is sufficiently large and the act of free-riding does not undermine production. In this sense, 'Absence of exclusion' is the organizing feature of commons-based peer production. Finally, integration requires (1) a quality control or integrity assurance mechanism, and (2) a method for combining individual contributions into the whole.