By Thiago V. S. Coelho
For too long, people have thought of the airwaves and waterways as “public” property that is best controlled by government. However, Murray Rothbard and others held that one could apply the institution of private property to both.
There must be a spectrum here: who owns a word? Probably no one. But maybe if its a brand? And a broadcast frequency feels a little like a word, it's not exactly something unique to an owner. We can imagine a world where we invent radios that can have multiple channels on one frequency. Another example might be a particular elliptic curve or more broadly a method of cryptography -- these things seem like they shouldn't be ownable.
Patent law feels pretty awful to me whenever I read about it. Is "owning" a frequency so different than a patent on a particular kind of cryptography? And then we get into Monsanto's patented seeds...
I suppose first use is kind of how we do domain names? But it doesn't seem very good. Feels like the scarcity is artificial, and I'd say the same for broadcast frequencies. I wonder what Rothbard would say now days.
It's about rivalrousness: my using a word doesn't prevent you from using it, while my use of a frequency does/can (at least if we're in the same area).
We don't need to define ownership over non-rivalrous things.
If there are ways to share the same frequency, then the entire frequency wouldn't be owned by the first user. They would only have homesteaded the aspect of it that they used.
Interesting. But rivalrousness doesn't apply to patents does it? One person using the same idea doesn't prevent another person from using it. Maybe they say it prevents the originator from making money off it, but that sounds ridiculous to me.
And what about waterways? Or roadways for that matter? They aren't necessarily rivalrous are they? At least, something like the Mississippi doesn't strike me as being so crowded that people can't use it.
It's funny: the first come first serve method of dealing with these things doesn't seem very good to me.
But then again, I've always felt a little nervous about the chain of custody of real estate in the US...
No, patents are bull shit.
Homesteading is about observable transformation. If you just paddle a boat up a river, you didn't transform the river and it therefor remains an unhomesteaded resource (factor of nature). If you build a road, you did transform the land to make it more suitable for transportation and you gain ownership.
There are in between cases, like a community gradually making a path as they walk over the same ground repeatedly. The path is an improvement but no one person made it. Here, we apply the idea of an easement. The members of the community made the path and retain the right to traverse it with no one having the right to turn it into something else.
Hoppe has a lengthy exposition about why first-come is the only rational standard for homesteading. I think it's in A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, which is excellent.
But how then does homesteading apply to a radiowave? It's not like the frequency is altered by broadcasts any more than the mississippi is altered by traffic. And the broadcaster could just as well broadcast on any other frequency.
Domain names don't seem to be homesteaded either. I'm not full up on the details, but isn't it like icana gives them to various registrars to sell? But of course, a bad system that we currently have isn't quite what the conversation is about.
I wonder what a better system for domain names homesteading or ownership would be. It's not something I've considered before.
(I should hop on Hope, but I don't nniw when I will -- trying iht max hillebrand's praxeology of privacy at the moment)
Technically what they're doing isn't altering the frequency. They're modulating the amplitude of waves with that frequency (at least for AM radio).
It's sort of like how your house doesn't alter the geometric space it occupies, just the configuration of stuff in that space, but we grant exclusive right of use to the space as well as the material in it.
Something like domain names must be homesteadable, I think, but I don't know the tech well enough to say much more. I believe you're right that the domain names we're familiar with are more like a social convention.
DNS is a criminally under discussed topic in the sovereign circles. Nobody thinks about infrastructure until it’s too late…
Anyway, I think domain names are a case of digital scarcity, just like bitcoin itself.
But since domains are fundamentally not fungible, you have another set of problems to deal on top, like squatting or pricing.
Squatting in this context means buying a desirable name early on with no intention of using it other than for speculative resell value.
There’s also the case that certain names are subjectively more valuable than others and, while a domain registrar can cook some inhouse algorithms to spit some pricing, and update it according to viral trends or whatever, it’s difficult to imagine a p2p system being able to make similar gatekeeping.
Lastly, internet domains aren’t sold, just leased, and there may be reasons for that to be a good thing other than the continued revenue stream for registrars. For one this, paired with subjective pricing, works as a mechanism to discourage squatting. It also prevents good names from ever being usable again just because someone lost interest or lost their wallet or something. Again, money is fungible, naming is not.
It’s in some ways a solved problem because you have your namecoins and unstoppable domains or whatever that technically work but also a hard problem to solve satisfactorily, every single attempt at this has a set of opinionated drawbacks.
There’s no answer to this problem that is clear cut like Bitcoin is to money, at least none that I’m aware of.
If domain names are only leased, that implies they are owned by the one leasing them out and just pushes back the question of how that person came to own them.
I don't think they own the names, but rather the ledger the names are in, which is sort of a map of names to real addresses. So, what you're leasing is the service of being mapped to a particular address. Please correct me wherever that's wrong.
God owns all!
which?
God the creator. from ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Not helpful for resolving disputes peacefully amongst humans
I mean if we understand scripture and treat others properly it fixes alot
Presumably so. As I understand it, that spells out some of the rules that would equate to secular ownership concepts.
100%
Every libertarian thought experiment eventually arrives at Okay, but who owns the ocean?
The challenge isn't defining ownership. It's resolving conflicts when two owners want to use the same invisible resource.