Dimensions of cooperative spectrum sharing: Rights and enforcement

Sharing of radio spectrum requires a careful and nuanced understanding of the rights of incumbents and spectrum entrants. In addition, the dynamics of stakeholders can be understood by examining how various rights are arranged (and rearranged) among them. Importantly, understanding the rights and their distribution is the predicate to developing rational and useful enforcement approaches. In this paper, we show that spectrum sharing involves a rearrangement of the rights associated with radio spectrum among stakeholders. We show how this rearrangement of rights implies the definition of new bundles of rights, appropriate to each particular sharing scenario. We discover these rights - and their (re)arrangement - by examining several cases of spectrum use. We begin with the rights associated with exclusive use and proceed to consider rights arrangement in commons and different spectrum sharing configurations. Further, in the case of commons, we explicitly examine how governance of commons can affect the rights distribution in spectrum. In each case, the bundles of rights associated with each stakeholder changes. New bundles of rights have consequences, not only on the behavior of spectrum users but also on the enforcement process. Our examination of the bundles of rights shows that each rearrangement results in different approaches to enforcement. We demonstrate this by revisiting enforcement in the cases we examine.