Bidding for rights is basically an ownership system already. Once you win a bid for a right, then you own the right.

Even if time limited?

So you bid for 5, 10 years or whatever becomes a good balance between stability to invest in the business and an agile market.

Yes, then you become a landlord for 5 or 10 years. Once the rights are given out by whatever method and set for 10 years, then anyone else who wants one in the next 10 years has to buy or rent one from whoever has one. That's landlordism.

But that would trend to cutting out the middle man due to the inefficiencies they create.

Middlemen will only work if either these middlemen make the utilization more efficient or you make the requirements to bid so onerous that only these specialized middlemen have the competency to do fulfill them.

No, middlemen would happen if it's profitable to be a middleman. Extreme case: one person bids just enough to get all the rights, then charges double that to fishermen to use them.

Which means in the next bidding round the fishermen would bid somewhere between the double they were charged, and could still apparently have a working businesses with, and what the middleman bid.

All it means is that they were expecting too large profit margins and someone called their bluff.

Has this been tried? It's been tried with housing (that's the current housing system).

No idea. But it is quite similar to how public transport works for archipelago ferries in Scandinavia.

15 year contracts when large investments are required. Otherwise 5-10 years.

And you get a ”quota” for a guaranteed traffic to run for that period based on the requirements in the contract.

Just took the same idea and applied to fishing, to prevent the ”legacies” from monopolizing it while giving the public the income of their shared resources.

A government contract isn't the same as a rights system. Presumably anyone else is also allowed to set up a ferry?

And anyone would be allowed to bid on the fishing quotas?

What’s the difference between a ferry and a fishing boat?

The difference is that there isn't a limited number of ferry licenses. They aren't rivalrous. Sure the government is paying for one to make sure there's at least one, but anyone could.

Of course they are rivalrous. Contracts change, boats get laid up and people are forced to change employers.

You can imagine on popular routes where you get to keep the proceeds that you instead pay for the right to operate it.

What’s the difference to paying for being allowed a quota to fish in the waters said ferry service runs a passenger service in?

Why would there be a limited number of ferry licenses?

Limited port capacity? Erosion? Limit disturbance of wild life?

Either way it is a public resource. On one side access to a countries fishing grounds to make money from it. On the other side access to a countries tax money to make money from it.

I get a feeling that you think fishermen should have some special heritage rights guaranteeing large profit margins rather than having to pay the public for the access to a shared resource.

My personal opinion is that trawling should be banned.

Without trawlers shoveling up entire populations and destroying the ecosystem around it, a lot of these issues will solve them selves.