An Economic Theory of Infrastructure and Commons Management

Abstract

The open access (commons) versus private control debate is raging.The debate takes place in a number of fields, including the intellectual property and cyberlaw literatures, as well as in broader public debates concerning propertization, privatization, deregulation, and commercialization of areas as diverse as communication networks, government services, national forests, and scientific research.On the private control side, there is robust economic theory supporting the market mechanism with minimal government regulation.In contrast, advocates of open access frequently call for protecting "the commons."The theoretical support for this prescriptive call, however, is underdeveloped from an economics perspective.In fact, many who oppose propertization, privatization, deregulation, and commercialization view the field of economics with sincere suspicion and doubt.This Article embraces economics and develops a theory of infrastructure that better explains why, for some classes of important resources, there are strong economic arguments for managing and sustaining the resources in an openly accessible [89:917 1.

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