The New York Times reports that the need to help pay for the payroll tax holiday and unemployment benefit extensions,
... has pushed Congress to embrace a generational shift in the country's media landscape: the auction of public airwaves now used for television broadcasts to create more wireless Internet systems.
While I think the tax holiday, extending the unemployment benefits, and even more wireless Internet systems are good things, This story makes me wonder if anyone in Washington, Republican or Democrat, has any clue at all. It drives me to despair.
I have always found the idea of auctioning spectrum reprehensible. If the airwaves belongs to the people, has seemed to be the original intent of the 1934 Telecommunications Act, how dare they sell it out from under us.
More significantly, once it is all sold, it can never be taken back. We will lose our ability to re-purpose the frequencies that have been sold ever again. What we are doing now: reassigning television frequencies to other uses will be impossible henceforth.
And finally, selling it is so short-sighted. Why not lease the spectrum? Why go for a one-time windfall, instead of a steady stream of revenue? I just don't get it. I never have.