The Future of Ideas, Lessig. p78. Lessig looks at the ethernet wire protocol, saying each node first looks at the wire for traffic, then if there is none, transmits. otherwise it waits a short while and checks later. if two nodes check at the same time when the line is clear, each will speak at the same time. a collision occurs and both hosts can detect this. in the case of a collision, each host waits a random amount of time before checking the wire again.

Lessig sees this as bottom-up spectrum allocation and promotes this idea over top-down - government controlled - spectrum allocation.

the devices would self-manage the spectrum. they would be required to have software that follows good-neighbor policies.