Economists talk about rivalrousness and excludability when classifying goods.
Rivalrous means that, to the extent I am using or possessing some good, you are not. Excludable means that I can, as a seller, prevent you from using it without payment.
Most physical goods are rivalrous and excludable. I can keep an icecream to myself and while I am digesting it, you are not. The icecream truck can prevent you taking one without payment. This meets the definition of what people usually think of as "private property".
Radio waves are rivalrous but not excludable; economists call these "common goods". These lead to -- you guessed it -- the tragedy of the commons, where individually optimal decisions lead to globally suboptimal outcomes.
Commons can't work unless agents agree to constrain themselves, or are made to constrain themselves. The former can happen by agreement, the latter by regulation.
In the case of radio, regulation has been the standard model because of the nature of the usage. Voice and vision have been analogue and the human nervous system is a poor demultiplexer, so they needed bands to themselves. Similarly for many other applications (radar, for example) , the amount of information put through a certain band has historically been low but the value high. So: regulation.
Wireless networks are an example of a commons managed by agreement; or perhaps managed by emergent phenomena. Each wireless node blindly follows some simple rules (such as randomised exponential backoff) that, in practice, make a shared medium largely usable.
Rivalrous means that, to the extent I am using or possessing some good, you are not. Excludable means that I can, as a seller, prevent you from using it without payment.
Most physical goods are rivalrous and excludable. I can keep an icecream to myself and while I am digesting it, you are not. The icecream truck can prevent you taking one without payment. This meets the definition of what people usually think of as "private property".
Radio waves are rivalrous but not excludable; economists call these "common goods". These lead to -- you guessed it -- the tragedy of the commons, where individually optimal decisions lead to globally suboptimal outcomes.
Commons can't work unless agents agree to constrain themselves, or are made to constrain themselves. The former can happen by agreement, the latter by regulation.
In the case of radio, regulation has been the standard model because of the nature of the usage. Voice and vision have been analogue and the human nervous system is a poor demultiplexer, so they needed bands to themselves. Similarly for many other applications (radar, for example) , the amount of information put through a certain band has historically been low but the value high. So: regulation.
Wireless networks are an example of a commons managed by agreement; or perhaps managed by emergent phenomena. Each wireless node blindly follows some simple rules (such as randomised exponential backoff) that, in practice, make a shared medium largely usable.
edits: to clarify terms a bit