Today’s NYT:

Professor 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.

(via ericmortensen:evangotlib)

The paragraph immediate before this one hints to why this is not such a great idea:

Over-the-air broadcasts are becoming a nearly obsolete technology. Already, 91 percent of American households get their television via cable or satellite. So we are using all of this beachfront property to serve a small and shrinking segment of the population.

You know who lives in those other 9% of American households? Poor people. That “small and shrinking segment of the population” are actually people who cannot afford cable. It’s Orwellian to call it “beachfront property.”

The obvious problem is cutting off the poor from news and PBS.  But more viscerally, I think people should have a right to watch their local baseball team via broadcast. It’s kind of the last vestige of access for something that’s meant to be for everyone.