FREE AIR.(The Talk of the Town)

In the late nineties, Washington policymakers took up a noble cause. There was a new technology, digital television, that almost everyone agreed would eventually 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."

To be fair, Washington did insist on some quid for its quo. In exchange for the new spectrum, the broadcasters would accelerate their move into digital programming, and they would return their old analog channels. This was the important part; technological innovation had made those channels extremely valuable, for high-speed wireless connections and public-safety radio transmissions, among other things. Of course, the government had given the broadcasters these channels in the first place, so it wasn't exactly driving a hard bargain. But it was getting something, at least.

Something is starting to look more and more like nothing. When the deal was made, in 1997, Washington anticipated that it would get all the old spectrum back by 2006. But now broadcasters have come up with a new plan: they'll keep the new spectrum and hold on to the old spectrum, too. And Congress appears to be going along with it. Last month, the Senate Commerce Committee killed a bill that would set a reasonable but firm deadline of 2009 for the return of the analog channels. In its place, the committee adopted a bill--backed by the broadcasters, naturally--that could enable them to hold on to most of their spectrum indefinitely.

The broadcasting industry is well acquainted with political favoritism and corporate welfare. Local TV stations have consistently been among the most lucrative businesses in the country, but they have never been asked to pay for their use of the public airwaves. In a sense, broadcasters are the modern equivalent of the railroads. In the nineteenth century, the railroads were given tens of millions of acres of land (adding up, eventually, to roughly ten per cent of the country); now broadcasters have been given billions of dollars' worth of electromagnetic real estate.

The government subsidized the railroads because it believed ...