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Originally posted by Mondak
Yakk - Tell you what. . . we will keep the part of the FCC that doles out bandwidth so that states don't pass conflicting standards and people don't just throw signals all over the place (like your FM Radio example).
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This goes directly in the face of the suggestion: they wanted to auction off all of the spectrum for whatever use the buyer wants. Once you have to make decisions like "which use is best" or other policy ones, you end up with beaurocracy and the like.
The effort and time to allocate a chunk of spectrum for new uses, like cell phones, is one of the things the policy put forward is trying to combat.
Then, you have regional vs national spectrum. Cell phone technology works much better with every cell phone using the same slice of spectrum accross the country. But, if the spectrum had already been sold off back in the 50s, no company could really afford to buy up an entire spectrum over the entire nation without something like eminant domain backing them. (hold-outs etc).
Do you want to get rid of just the decency police?
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Also - something like HDTV I am not sure is a public good. Why do tax payers have to pay to "bump" the HDTV industry. If the free market does not demand it, then in this case it must not be that important. If it is not that important, I don't want my taxes paying for it.
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The free market has certain properties and problems that it solves. It isn't good at some things. The free market is not god.
The free market makes local optimizations, and can some large-scale pruning. But it fails in numerous well-documented cases. One solution is to live with the failures. Another is to adapt to the failures and use the free market when it works.
The free market didn't provide the world with the Internet.
Now, I don't know if HDTV is a good idea: but, the fact that the free market wouldn't push us over the tipping point without aid is not a proof that it is a bad idea. If you care about government money, possibly a relatively small amount of government money could push it over the tipping point and generate more tax revenue than it cost in the first place due to increased economic activity.
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Originally posted by Jimmy4
The switch from normal TV to HDTV is much like the switch from black and white to color.
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Strangely enough, it isn't.
They did some amazing hacks that allowed color signals to be broadcast and picked up by B&W TVs. I believe for the most part the color signal fit in the B&W signal spectrum, so no spectrum purchases or juggling had to occur.
HDTV, on the other hand, requires new spectrum room.
It is somewhat similar, on the other hand.
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Eventually, a majority of networks are in HD, and the rest fall in place accordingly.
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The key word is "eventually". Eventually we will all die of old age. Eventually an economy in depression will work it way out of depression. There is a very strong case to make for pushing economies out of depression without relying on the free market: weaker versions of the same arguement apply to other forms of market intervention.
The strongest arguement behind chopping up the FCC is the existance of satalite, internet and other forms of non (or not as)-natural-monopoly flavours of information delivery.
At the same time, those methods will eventually make the traditional means of recieving entertainment obsolete. People will eventually not listen to FM radio, because they can get a better quality radio off the internet feed in their car. On-air broadcasts won't be worth doing, the'll feed them over the internet to people who want to watch.
This will happen, eventually. Should one make decisions that will make it happen faster?