There are many natural resources endowed to us at birth… air, water, fossil fuels, and spectrum.

Spectrum?

What’s that you say? It’s the airwaves. It’s the natural resource that brings light to our eyes and radio to our cars. It’s the medium used to take x-rays, run your cell phone, and bring the Internet to your wireless laptop.

It’s a unique natural resource in the sense that it cannot be depleted. But certain technical limitations (i.e. interference) means it must be used with some level of oversight, so as to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Advances in technology may overcome this limitation, but we’re not quite there yet. Hence its regulation by the FCC.

All spectrum isn’t created equal. Some spectrum is good for one purpose, but not for another. You can cook a frozen burrito using microwaves or gamma rays, but I wouldn’t recommend the latter.

Similarly, certain spectral regions are better suited for transporting digital information. The spectrum used by over-the-air (broadcast) television stations is perhaps the most valuable, as the physical characteristics of this region of spectrum make it much more practical to transmit signals through buildings, hills, trees, and other objects that might block a higher frequency signal.

Some estimates put the value of the TV-band spectrum at nearly one trillion dollars. But how much does the FCC charge TV station owners for use of this resource?

Nothing. Nada. Zip, zilch, zero. And it doesn’t end there. The law also mandates that privately owned cable systems carry the signals of all local broadcast stations, vastly increasing their audience.

All the Congress mandates in return, is that the broadcasters act in the “public interest”. Ah, but the students of free speech out there will recognize the difficulty in actually ensuring this happens.

So let me ask you, should home shopping count as public interest programming? …

Since the first amendment (rightly so) makes it difficult for Congress to mandate broadcast content that is in the public interest, we get very little in return for our valuable gift of spectrum. The only thing Congress does mandate is every broadcaster air at least 3 hours a week of “quality children’s programming”.

And the broadcasters sure are happy to meet this obligation. In the past some stations sought to meet the requirements by airing shows such as The Flintstones, arguing it taught children history. Shows such as Lizzy McGuire, Unbelievable Animal Rescues, and Stargate-Infinity are frequently used to meet the requirement. While perhaps entertaining, these shows can hardly be described as educational, and are interspersed with advertising, much of which is for sugary snacks and fast food.

Most of this programming is aired in time slots that are of low value to broadcasters, during times when very little of the target audience is actually able to watch. A review by the Annenberg Policy Center found that only 7 percent of shows were aired in the afternoons, a time when many children are in front of the television.

But here’s something that I came across when researching this issue. Home shopping channels operating on broadcast signals are present in many TV markets. What? Home shopping? How can that possibly be construed to be in the public interest, and what type of “high-quality” children’s programming are they airing?

The Boston market alone has two high-powered TV stations that exclusively air home shopping. WWDP (channel 46) is affiliated with the ShopNBC network, and WMFP (channel 62) is affiliated with the Shop@Home network. How do they fill their 3-hour children’s programming requirement?

They don’t.

WWDP airs one hour of non-shopping children’s programming on Sunday mornings. The programming consists of two religious themed shows, Just Kids and Kingsley’s Meadow. WMFP supposedly airs New Zoo Revue and Ask Gilby on Wednesday mornings, but a search of the TV listings doesn’t confirm this. A search of the FCC filings of TV stations fulfillment of the Children’s Television Act obligations doesn’t even list these two stations.

So what’s going on here? Maybe someone at the FCC should look into this.

In the meantime, how about we chuck out this whole notion of public interest obligations? The National Association of Broadcasters claims that their members air well over 7 billion dollars a year in public service announcements. This number is obviously wildly exaggerated, but lets take them at their word. How about we say, "OK, forget the PSA’s". Instead, give the Federal Government that 7 billion, and we’ll use it to endow a trust fund for public broadcasting.

Currently the BBC’s entire budget is about 7 billion, while the Congress appropriates about 400 million a year for our public broadcasting system. With 7 billion a year coming in, we could truly make the system independent from political pressure, and provide a quality alternative to what’s currently available over the airwaves.

This is the notion of a spectrum use fee. It’s high time the public gets some actual value for our spectrum. Broadcasting itself is a dying dinosaur. This spectrum would be better used to provide wireless broadband, creating a new platform for Internet service that leads to more competition among providers, and can bring the Internet to underserved rural areas.

But it probably will never happen. The broadcast lobby is just too powerful.