Stewart Wolpin

This Air Is Your Air, This Air Is Their Air
March 28, 2008

As I was saying, the federal government has harvested (so far) $19.56 billion from the analog TV spectrum auctions last week.

But only $1.15 billion has been allocated to the converter-box program.

I said this was wrong that the government should be piling up these profits and then making consumers pay even a few dollars to buy a converter box, and I was right.

Or, at least Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) agrees that I'm right.

"I do not believe there will be enough money dedicated for the purchase of these converter boxes," Rep. Boucher told me earlier this week. "At the current pace of demand for the boxes, the initial fund, designed to fund coupons for 30 million converter boxes, will be exhausted Aug. 1." Boucher told me he and others lobbied long and hard to fund coupons for 70 million converter boxes.

But enough money for converter box coupons isn't the only problem.

Many TV watchers will not only need a converter box, but also a new antenna. In the analog world, signals peter out at the edge of a broadcast range. You may not get a crystal-clear picture, but you'll get enough sound and image to be at least mildly diverted from life's daily grind.

Digital signals, however, don't peter — they poop. In an analog TV world, waving your rabbit ears may have gotten you at least a shaky picture. In a digital TV world, waving your rabbit ears will give you nothing but sore arms and a bugged bunny.

According to Boucher, $10 billion of the spectrum auction proceeds already have been allocated for the ever-popular "other expenditures." That leaves $9.56 billion for more coupons, antennas and additional (and hopefully more effective) outreach and educational programs.

Boucher says he and the NTIA will monitor the coupon fund in case the current high demand is simply an initial surge that could slacken off. Once a more definitive trend emerges, probably around Aug. 1, a decision about additional allocations will be made.

All well and good, but this spectrum folderol awoke my inner Eugene Debs.

It occurred to me this whole spectrum business could be double taxation.

Tell me if this Socrates is a man/all men are mortal/Socrates is mortal analysis makes any sense:

* We pay taxes to the Federal government to administer the public airways.

* The Feds sells our public airways to commercial interests.

* We pay commercial interests to use these public airways.

So aren't we paying twice for these airways?

If that doesn't jam your zipper, how about this:

Aren't we paying to use something we already own?

For instance, we don't pay for over-the-air TV or AM/FM radio. Local broadcasters, unlike Verizon, AT&T and the other wireless behemoths who just shelled out billions in the spectrum auctions, paid nothing for either their original analog spectrum or the new digital spectrum. Instead of charging us to use our own spectrum, TV and radio stations charge advertisers and agree to a certain amount of "public affairs" programming. The government earns its money from the taxes these broadcasters pay.

This makes sense and seems to work quite nicely, although I wish I didn't have to weed through such mind-numbing drivel to get to the important stuff like expansive information to enable me to intelligently participate in our democracy. But that's just me.

I know that the wireless world can't work like this unless I agree to answer and listen to robo ad calls or receive text advertisements from sponsors signed up by my carrier. But something about all this gives my neural neurons noogies.

Edison Redux

In a bizarre coincidence, the one time I decide to reply to a comment to these posts, the real world answers back.

Last week I asserted that our world would be radically different without Thomas Edison to a respondent who asserted the opposite.

Just days later, a couple of audio researchers found an audio recording made 17 years before Edison invented his phonograph.

So there, says the real world. (The real world actually used more explicit language, but this is a family industry trade site.)

Well, I don't care. I mean about the priority of the invention and its seeming support for the Edison-wasn't-all-that school of thought, not about the discovery.

These 1861 phonautogram "recordings" made by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville aren't really recordings in the modern sense. They are visual representations of sounds, if I understand this correctly. And the machine made to create them, the phonautograph, could not play them back, at least according to The New York Times.

Therefore, the technology was more-or-less what we today call a "proof of concept." Interesting? Absolutely. But the technology was never designed for commercialization.

That was left for — you guessed it.

So there, smugly says I.

Posted by Stewart Wolpin on March 28, 2008 | Comments (0)