But I agree entirely with the main thrust of your article. Economists’ intuitions sometimes need to be examined. When I first explained the then new-fangled internet to one merchant banker he was really quite shocked that that it should cost no more to access a computer on the other side of the world than on the other side of town. It’s true that such inefficient pricing encourages people to squander a resource, but if the resource gets cheaper the more people squander it then inefficient pricing is a good thing, and will remain so as long as the economies of scale continue to accumulate.

The success of Wi-Fi suggests that we could be at a similar stage where an explosion of usage could lead to an explosion of supply – unless tha demand is strangled at birth by some clunky licensing mechanism whose cost-per-byte is exceeded only by its cost of implementation and the perhaps incalculable cost in lost opportunies.

And note that we do charge for the use of oxygen in some settings; out there in California, for instance, firms can buy and sell “pollution credits” that allow their holders to put certain amounts of harmful material into the air.

These issues lead me to think that the pricing concerns raised by Noam, and the practical strategic concerns raised by Werbach, deserve further, serious attention.

Those on the property side say that the moment we have a commons, someone will blast constant max-power signals that prevent everyone else from communicating. The response to that is either that we’ll have etiquettes (which they attack as bad old FCC regulation) or there will be enough room for others to route around the damage (which puts us back in the first argument about technology and capacity).

Yochai’s paper is indeed terrific, in that it parries the pro-property argument about scarcity within the idiom of economics. But it doesn’t speak to the issue of what will happen in practice.