Chris Davies offers a fine dissent on open source spectrum today.
If you look at his example it even looks compelling.

There are problems with power management, with computing requirements, and with wave attenuation in the open spectrum idea. But the problem isn't inherent in the spectrum proposal of Kevin Werbach (left), and the solution isn't to sell spectrum to the highest bidder. That doesn't really deal with the problem.

The problem is two words: real estate.

Waves don't respect real estate. Waves will cross a real estate boundary and keep running until they hit something that's relevant to them - another wave, a wall, or some technical doohickey that stops waves cold. (The page from which this illustration was taken bears reading.)

But real estate owners, almost to a man, believe that they should control the private communication links on the property they own. Notice I said private links. You don't even see Airports trying to forbid TV signals from coming in.

This is the key concept behind paid WiFi, even behind public paid WiFi schemes like the one in Atlanta, where I live. Starbucks figures it "owns" its real estate and should make you pay for "its" WiFi concessionaire. So does the Atlanta Airport.

But is this the way it has to be? After all, the costs of delivering connectivity to any location, through WiFi or WiMax, keeps going down with Moore's Law. You're talking about equipment, backhaul, a little maintenance. And Moore's Law guarantees there should never be a shortage of fiber bandwidth, not with MWDM around.

This is not the politically correct time to be bringing this up, not with property enshrined as the right that trumps all others, in Washington, in State Capitols, and in the hearts of American property owners.

But right now property "rights" are the only remaining roadblock to the greater good of open spectrum, free communication for everyone.

And if we let our ideology keep us from following, the benefits of open spectrum, like those of Moore's Law itself, can simply go elsewhere. Just as waves don't respect property lines, science won't respect political boundaries.

Or put it this way. The Internet will benefit those who welcome it and bypass those who don't. Open spectrum is merely the Internet idea applied to wireless.