Lord Cornwallis must be turning in his grave at the Supreme Court's order last week to auction 2G spectrum.The debate about the relative merits of auctions versus administrative allocation that Cornwallis started in 1784 is still going on.
Cornwallis, as soon as he became governor-general, overturned his predecessor Warren Hastings' system of auctioning revenue collection rights to the highest bidders, and switched to a one-time assessment system which he hoped would encourage landlords to think long-term.
A cottage industry of Indian economists has flourished debating this decision ever since.
The electromagnetic spectrum is to the Information Age what land was in Lord Cornwallis' time: a critical source of societal wealth.
And just as it was believed that a zamindar needed exclusive rights to a piece of land, to be incentivised to use it productively, it is now believed that telecom operators, the zamindars of the Information Age, also need such exclusivity in the use of spectrum to work it and deliver gigantic auction bonanzas for governments.
But listen to this fable from Stuart Buck, writing in Stanford Technology Law Review.
You are in a crowded party where so many people are talking that you can barely hear your own voice in the din.
Suddenly, officious-looking people arrive, announcing that they are from the Federal Speech Commission - established recently to solve the problem of people not being able to hear each other at noisy parties like this.
They ask everyone in the room to line up and explain what they want to converse about.
Based on the quality and depth of the proposed conversation (preference would be given to "useful" conversations such as those on economics and foreign affairs), rights for talking in turn for the rest of the night would be issued.
This system went on for some time, till the authorities discovered a better system:
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