Congress has finally cracked the seal. By passing the One Big Beautiful Bill, lawmakers restored the Federal Communications Commission’s authority to auction slices of the electromagnetic spectrum through September 30, 2034—unlocking up to 800 MHz for commercial use. After a year of bureaucratic drift, Washington has put the auction machine back in gear. But getting back to where we were is not the same as getting where we need to go. The past year proved that the U.S. can’t keep rationing a 21st-century lifeline with a 20th-century playbook.

To preserve technological primacy—and the geopolitical influence that comes with it—America must stop treating spectrum as a political concession and start treating it as an economic asset. That means moving beyond episodic, top-down assignments toward a system that enables trading, leasing, and real-time sharing. The goal isn’t to privatize the ether; it’s to make a scarce resource work harder, faster, and smarter than bureaucracy ever will.

In 2024, for the first time in three decades, Congress let the FCC’s auction authority lapse. For a year, the market that powers mobile connectivity went quiet. The message to operators and investors was muddled at best: innovate, but please wait. Now that authority is restored until 2034, Washington may be tempted to return to the familiar rhythm of high-stakes, episodic auctions. That would be a mistake. Rewinding the tape simply delays the problem another decade; it doesn’t solve it.

Spectrum may sound abstract, the domain of engineers and ham-radio buffs, but it is the nervous system of the modern economy: the invisible lanes that carry your music stream to the car, your video call to a colleague, your drone’s guidance signal back to base. Not all lanes are equal. The sweet spot for telecommunications—the frequencies that travel far, slip through walls, and maintain quality—occupies a surprisingly narrow band. And the traffic keeps piling up. By the mid-2030s, mobile data volumes could overwhelm current allocations, turning networks into permanent rush hour. That’s not a mere annoyance; it’s a cap on growth.

When networks stall, productivity bleeds. Logistics firms lose track of inventory. Hospitals struggle to expand tele-diagnostics. Farmers lose the aerial eyes that guide precision agriculture. Traders miss millisecond edges that add up to millions. Cities get less intelligent, buses less predictable. And for those already at the margins of connectivity, opportunity narrows further. In a country where participation in civic and economic life presumes reliable broadband, chronic congestion is not just a technical failure—it’s a political choice with social consequences.

It’s also a geopolitical liability. The Huawei saga showed what happens when critical infrastructure is tied to an authoritarian state: surveillance and leverage follow. Meanwhile, China has spent a decade saturating its territory with denser, faster networks, making itself a magnet for developers of bandwidth-hungry applications—from on-device AI to industrial augmented reality. If the U.S. can’t fully harness its spectrum, it risks ceding advantage not just in products but in the standards and norms that will define the next Internet.

So why does America still govern the ether like a New Deal utility? Because spectrum is labeled “public property,” parceled out by government officials deciding who gets which slice, under what conditions, and for how long. That premise breeds three chronic problems: rigidity, delay, and revenue dependence. Licenses sit underused because holders can’t easily trade or share them without a regulatory odyssey. Reallocations take years while technology and demand sprint ahead. And auctions have become budgetary piggy banks, entrenching the state’s role as gatekeeper rather than steward.

There is another way. Imagine spectrum managed like intellectual property: a tradable, leasable asset with clear rights, obligations, and liability. Operators could buy, sell, or rent access as demand shifts. Rights could be carved up by geography, time, or power level. New entrants wouldn’t have to wait for once-a-decade auctions to test better radios or more efficient protocols. Capital could flow to innovators who squeeze more bits per hertz from every band.

This market-oriented model offers three chief virtues. First, efficiency: dynamic access lets multiple users share the same band without stepping on one another, aided by modern radios and software that allocate capacity in real time. Second, innovation: lowering barriers invites smaller players—campus networks, industrial systems, community broadband—to experiment, while giving incumbents incentives to upgrade and monetize holdings. Third, responsiveness: markets adjust in weeks, not election cycles. When a city hosts a major event, when a factory expands, when a wildfire knocks out backhaul, spectrum can move where it’s needed, when it’s needed.

Critics warn that liberalization without a strong referee risks chaos. But interference today is less a morality play than an engineering problem. Radios already negotiate power levels, coordinate timing, and follow protocols that prevent harmful overlap. Shared-access frameworks can encode these rules, and regulators can enforce them with sharper, faster tools: penalties for repeat offenders, incentives for efficiency, and transparent monitoring. Order need not mean ossification.

None of this means abandoning the public interest. National security users will always need protected lanes—and the ability to preempt when mission demands it. Rural and low-income communities will still need targeted support. But those goals are easier to meet in a system that multiplies capacity, invites new investment, and clarifies rights than in one that hoards scarcity and fosters uncertainty.

The new law creates an opening—not just to debate which bands to auction, but what kind of spectrum economy America wants. Replicating the status quo ensures we’ll face the same bottlenecks a decade from now, only more painfully. The real challenge now is cultural. Can policymakers let go of the fiction that Washington can forecast optimal use of the airwaves for ten or twenty years? Can they accept that permissionless experimentation, bounded by clear rules, has historically delivered more prosperity than central planning?

America’s technological supremacy wasn’t built by auctioning scarcity. It was built by creating room for people to try things—venture capitalists willing to lose money, engineers willing to break radios and rebuild them, companies willing to bet new markets would emerge if costs fell fast enough. Liberalizing spectrum doesn’t mean abandoning the public interest. It means acknowledging that the public interest is best served when a foundational resource is abundant, tradable, and governed by rules that reward efficiency, not incumbency.

Treat the airwaves like the asset they are. Define rights with precision. Build markets that let capacity flow to its highest use. Invest in the tools that make sharing safe. Keep protected lanes for missions that truly need them. And then, step aside.

If Congress wants to preserve American leadership, it shouldn’t just restart the auction engine. It should build a spectrum regime that matches the country’s dynamism—one where bandwidth moves as quickly as the ideas that depend on it.