Congress took the correct action on Wednesday not to push back the date for the nation's transition to digital-only TV (DTV) broadcasting because a delay would have been neither politically shrewd nor in the interest of the public good, says a former Federal Communications Commission economist now at Duke University.
"When the DTV transition happens, there are going to be some people -- the uninformed, misinformed and procrastinators -- who are not ready. They will complain," said Leslie M. Marx, a professor at Duke's Fuqua School of Business who served as the FCC's chief economist in 2005 and 2006. "But that was going to happen regardless of whether the transition happens next month or in five months.
"By letting the DTV transition go ahead as planned, Congress and the Obama administration can blame any problems on the FCC and the previous Republican administration," Marx said. "If they had postponed the transition, then they ‘owned' it. Any problems were then theirs."
Marx points out that a year ago communications companies bid $19 billion for the right to use the spectrum currently being used for analog TV signals.
"If I were working for one of the companies that bought the spectrum and a four-month delay had occurred, I would be asking the government for some kind of compensation," she said. "Delaying the transition could also have cost the government a lot of goodwill."