Spectrum Free-for-all

The New Yorker discusses the giveaway of spectrum to television broadcasters for the transition to DTV: Free Air

In the late nineties, Washington policymaker took up a noble cause. There was a ne technology, digital television, that almos everyone agreed would eventuall 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.”

The Feature: How The Plan To Reclaim Spectrum Got Waylaid

In an effort to push US broadcasters to move to digital television broadcasts rather than current analog broadcasts, the US government gave broadcasters a huge swath of spectrum to use for that purpose. This followed a well fought battle over whether or not the broadcasters should be given spectrum for free -- when it could clearly have been auctioned off. The "compromise" agreement was that the spectrum was actually being "loaned" to broadcasters to help make their transition to digital TV easier. After that was done, they would return their unused spectrum. The plan was for all of this to happen by the end of 2006. However, the broadcasters received an important loophole: the handover would only occur if 85% of the viewers in their area had equipment to view digital TV.

Previously: I Want My DTV