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Greetings. As noted in: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/14/AR2005101401960.html Congress is moving toward demanding a late 2008, early 2009 cutoff to conventional off-air analog television broadcasting. Without getting into all of the arguments again here that we've discussed previously, it's amusing to note the newly opportunistic hypocrisy in some of the arguments for the cutoff. In particular, we're now seeing the recent hurricanes being used as an excuse, to "free up spectrum already set aside to improve police, firefighter and other emergency communications." But we know what's really going on. Most of the spectrum to be pulled from analog TV has nothing whatever to do with public safety, and everything to do with auctioning off the spectrum to private companies for many billions of dollars. Those billions have been written into the budget for years, and Congress is desperate to get that "IOU" off of the books. It's true that only a relatively small percentage of U.S. television viewers still depend on off-air broadcasting for all of their TV viewing. But in terms of absolute numbers it's still lots of people. And that doesn't even take into account all of the secondary TVs that many people have in their homes that often depend on off-air signals, even if a fancier primary set is hooked to cable or satellite. I assert that only a tiny percentage of U.S. viewers have any concept that the federal government is getting ready to obsolete all of those otherwise working televisions. People continue to buy all manner of analog TVs every day, totally oblivious to this issue. I also find it remarkable -- given the press of other budget priorities like war, hurricane relief, etc. -- that Congress is seriously considering actually subsidizing the cost of converter boxes as well, when most people already have televisions that would continue to work just fine if this forced transition weren't being rammed down their throats. If Congress hadn't counted on the spectrum sale money before it actually existed, we wouldn't have this mess. As usual, it's ordinary consumers who end up getting the shaft. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein lauren@pfir.org or lauren@vortex.com or lauren@www.eepi.org Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 http://www.pfir.org/lauren Co-Founder, PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org Co-Founder, EEPI - Electronic Entertainment Policy Initiative - http://www.eepi.org Moderator, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com DayThink: http://daythink.vortex.com _______________________________________________ EEPI-Discuss mailing list information: http://lists.eepi.org/mailman/listinfo/eepi-discuss