Step 2: Cripple the regulatory powers of the government by convincing everyone that government is the problem.
Step 3: Soak your now captive customers in a regulatory friendly / competion-free environment.
A good regulation would be one which ensures competition, for instance by ensuring infrastructure in rural areas can be used by multiple companies isntead of making entry into the market expensive.
As it is now we have "innovators" who have access to private bands, and should know better (the cellular telecoms) threatening to trash the ITU bands with 5G coverage. It's a travesty since the result will be cellular Big Co basically squashing your Wi-Fi and the smaller players who can't afford private spectrum.
Additionally, in any given location most of the spectrum is unused but reserved, smarter devices could take advantage of this, but current regulations prohibit this from becoming a reality. With certain portions of cellular spectrum in particular this could be hugely advantageous to consumers, at the cost of governments who wouldn't be able to make money selling that spectrum.
There are alternative solutions - like opening up wide swaths of spectrum to smarter devices that are able to share that spectrum broadly.
Government enforced monopolies present the worst of both corporate and regulatory worlds - a disaster for the consumer. Shouldn't we care more about the market for services the consumers get than the market for spectrum that providers buy?
That is what happens for every natural resource. Your gov establishes rules for land and ground water just like that. Actually, even for IP and patents...
I don't see how you get from "gov regulated process of resource allocation" to "gov enforced monopolies". Yes, we should care about the value generated to consumers. The theory is that companies use exactly this money from consumers to get the spectrum.
> There are alternative solutions - like opening up wide swaths of spectrum to smarter devices that are able to share that spectrum broadly.
That only works with strong regulation (I'd guess you don't want gov involved in details?) or in situations were cooperation will always win out. Otherwise you'd usually end up with with some kind of Tragedy of the commons / Prisoner's dilemma like situation. Like every neighbor here upping their WLAN power...
Patents and copyrights are an intentional breaking of this market to encourage innovation - explicitly with the intention of creating a temporary monopoly. One can hope that government doesn't go out with the goal of creating a monopoly on cell service.