To reduce the deficit, should the FCC nix antenna TV?
Here's a controversial idea: By auctioning off the radio spectrum currently used for over-the-air TV broadcasts, the government could raise billions of dollars and put the money toward our bloated budget deficit. No more antennas, no more digital converter boxes.
Sound outlandish? Richard Thaler, an economist and behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago, doesn't think so. Under his proposal, detailed in a recent New York Times op-ed, local TV stations would lose the free broadcast frequencies they've heretofore been granted by the FCC. Those frequencies—coveted for their ability to travel long distances and through walls—would be put up for sale. The frequencies could then be used by companies to provide more bandwidth for your smart phone, Internet access, and more.
Thaler references an estimate made by the fomer chief economist for the FCC:
Professor [Thomas W.] Hazlett estimates that selling off this spectrum could raise at least $100 billion for the government and, more important, create roughly $1 trillion worth of value to users of the resulting services. Those services would include ultrahigh-speed wireless Internet access (including access for schools, of course) much improved cellphone coverage and fewer ugly cell towers. And they would include other new things we can’t imagine any more than we could have imagined an iPhone just 10 years ago.
And what about the folks who don't have cable or satellite, and who scrambled to get digital converter boxes last year? Thaler argues that only nine percent of the population make up that demographic, and that they could still get local channels through cable/satellite providers:
[A]bout 99 percent of these households have cable running near their homes, and virtually all the others, in rural areas, could be reached by satellite services. The F.C.C. could require cable and satellite providers to offer a low-cost service that carries only local channels, and to give vouchers for connecting to that service to any households that haven’t subscribed to cable or satellite for, say, two years.
So, to the nine percent who still make use of those free over-the-air broadcasts, what do you think?
—Nick K. Mandle
