content: It works the same way pretty much everywhere, and there are spectrum auctions in many places other than the United States.  You can't just have people randomly broadcasting over any frequency they want, otherwise phone, tv, radio, you name it, could stop working.    As the article says, you can only cram so much data into a range of frequencies.  As some frequency bands get freed up because the services that use them go away -- like analog TV signals for example -- there has to be a process to give access to them.  I agree it's not the most democratic process, but really, this isn't exactly something that ordinary citizens are in a position to offer an opinion on.