In February 2021, Verizon wrote a check for $45.5 billion. AT&T paid $23 billion. T-Mobile paid $9 billion. In a single FCC auction, three companies spent $81 billion to use a band of radio frequencies for 5G service. They did not buy the airwaves. They licensed them. The airwaves still belong to the public.
That $81 billion is not unusual. Since 1994, the FCC has conducted over 100 spectrum auctions and raised more than $233 billion in total. On June 2, 2026, Auction 113 will open bidding on AWS-3 frequencies, the FCC’s first auction since its authority lapsed in March 2023 and was restored two years later. The money will flow again.
And like every previous auction, it will flow straight into the U.S. Treasury. Not into a fund. Not back to the 330 million Americans who own the airwaves. Into the federal budget, where Congress will spend it on whatever it needs to pay for.
The Largest Public Revenue Stream Nobody Talks About
Radio spectrum is the electromagnetic space that carries phone calls, Wi-Fi signals, and streaming video. It exists. It belongs to the public. Governments figured out decades ago that the fair way to allocate it was through competitive auctions. Ronald Coase proposed the idea in 1959. Congress adopted it in 1993. Before that, the FCC assigned licenses through comparative hearings, a process that invited lobbying and favoritism. Auctions were faster, fairer, and generated actual revenue.
The amounts are staggering. The UK’s 2000 3G auction raised £22.5 billion, about 2.5% of GDP at the time. The Treasury used the proceeds to pay down the national debt. India’s 2022 5G auction raised ₹1.5 trillion ($18 billion). Globally, spectrum auctions raised $7.1 billion in 2025 alone, with cumulative totals in the hundreds of billions. Germany, France, South Korea, Brazil, Japan: every country with a mobile network has auctioned spectrum. Every one of them kept the money.
The Congressional Budget Office projects another $85 billion in U.S. auction revenue over the next decade. The FCC has already scheduled a follow-up Upper C-band auction by July 2027 that could rival the $81 billion 2021 sale. This is not a one-time windfall. It is a recurring revenue stream from a shared resource, and it will keep growing as demand for wireless bandwidth increases.
The Principle Nobody Disputes
Spectrum auctions work because they follow a principle that is hard to argue with: if a private company wants exclusive use of a shared resource, it should pay for that access. The auction mechanism prices the resource efficiently. The highest bidder gets the license. The revenue represents the economic rent on the public’s asset.
Nobody claims Verizon invented the electromagnetic spectrum. Nobody argues that AT&T built the airwaves. The companies are paying for access to something that was already there. That is rent.
The logic extends to other shared inputs. The atmosphere absorbs emissions. Charge for it. Land in Manhattan appreciates because of public investment in infrastructure. Capture the gain. Data generated by billions of people fuels a $1.14 trillion advertising industry. Price the input. Spectrum is the clearest example because the auction mechanism is already built, the revenue is already flowing, and nobody disputes that the airwaves are public property. The only question is who benefits from the rent.
What UBI Gets Right, and Where It Stops
Universal basic income proposals often point to spectrum revenue as proof that shared resources can fund universal payments. The argument is sound: the resource is shared, the revenue is large, and directing it to every citizen would be more equitable than absorbing it into the general budget.
Where most UBI proposals stop is at the border. A spectrum dividend funded by U.S. auctions would reach 330 million Americans. But the electromagnetic spectrum is not an American invention. Radio waves do not stop at the U.S. border. Every country auctions the same physics.
The FCC’s $233 billion is the largest national share. The UK, India, Germany, and dozens of other countries have each collected billions more. Over 100 countries now auction spectrum. The resource is universal. The returns are national.
A commons dividend built on spectrum revenue would start with what already works: national auctions pricing a shared resource. The difference is treating the revenue as what it is, a return on public ownership, and distributing it accordingly. First within each country. Eventually, across borders, because the resource itself does not recognize them.
The Infrastructure Already Exists
Spectrum auctions are not theoretical. They are not a pilot program or a proposal waiting for political will. They are a thirty-year-old system operating in over 100 countries, generating hundreds of billions in revenue from a resource everyone agrees is publicly owned.
Auction 113 opens in three months. The revenue will flow to the Treasury. Congress will spend it. The public will not see a cent. The infrastructure for pricing shared resources already exists. The revenue is already large. The only missing piece is the dividend.
