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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.