[IP] Free Air
Begin forwarded message:
From: Monty Solomon <monty@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 18, 2004 3:59:21 PM EDT
To: undisclosed-recipient: ;
Subject: Free Air
THE FINANCIAL PAGE
FREE AIR
Issue of 2004-10-18
Posted 2004-10-11
In the late nineties, Washington policymakers took up a noble cause.
There was a new technology, digital television, that almost everyone
agreed would eventually revolutionize TV, but-quelle horreur-almost
no one was adopting it. Among other things, local TV stations
couldn't transmit digital signals on their existing analog channels.
They needed digital spectrum. (If you think of the electromagnetic
spectrum as a highway, digital and analog signals travel in different
lanes.) So Congress decided to give the stations a leg up-or, rather,
a handout. Instead of auctioning off the digital spectrum (which
might have brought in new competitors, not to mention money), or
simply asking broadcasters to pay for it (it was worth,
conservatively, tens of billions of dollars), Congress offered it to
them free. It was, as Reed Hundt, who was the F.C.C. chairman, said
at the time, "the largest single grant of public property to . . .
the private sector in this century." Senator John McCain was a little
more blunt. He called it "one of the great rip-offs in American
history."
To be fair, Washington did insist on some quid for its quo. In
exchange for the new spectrum, the broadcasters would accelerate
their move into digital programming, and they would return their old
analog channels. This was the important part; technological
innovation had made those channels extremely valuable, for high-speed
wireless connections and public-safety radio transmissions, among
other things. Of course, the government had given the broadcasters
these channels in the first place, so it wasn't exactly driving a
hard bargain. But it was getting something, at least.
Something is starting to look more and more like nothing.
...
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?041018ta_talk_surowiecki
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