Lee Gomes at the WSJ has a great column on Open Spectrum–essentially the dynamic allocation of radio bandwidth among devices smart enough to share it efficiently.
I first heard of this idea in Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. Part of Lessig’s thesis is that many industries make money by creating artificial scarcity. Call it the John D. Rockefeller strategy.
Spectrum scarcity may not be a problem much longer, but there are a lot of entrenched interests who want to keep it scarce.