Slashdot Mirror
Conflict of Interest May Taint DTV Delay Proposal
Anonymous writes "Ars Technica has discovered that one of the Obama transition team members advising on the digital TV transition has a conflict of interest that would benefit WiMAX carrier Clearwire over Verizon. 'Barack Obama's call to delay the DTV transition would affect not only millions of analog TV viewers, but also powerful companies with a vested interest in the changeover date — including at least one with an executive on Obama's transition team.'"
Having RTFA...
Salemme is not actually an adviser to Obama. He met with Senator Rockefeller and Tom Wheeler (one of Obama's many advisers) last week. He also donated some money to the Obama campaign. That appears to be the sum total of his involvement. Not very compelling evidence that he is behind the policy, if you ask me.
The assertion that he is a transition team member appears to be outright false.
Can anyone educate me on why a mandated cutting analog is a requirement of DTV?
The spectrum that analog TV uses was sold off so that companies like Verizon could use it for a new wireless network service. Can't really do that while analog TV broadcasts are still using the spectrum.
Do not anger the worm.
I know that seems counterintuitive, but the answer is ultimately fairly simple if you look at the politics behind the DTV switch. A while back, the US government (Clinton Era) decided to sell off the public airwaves to various companies. Of course, in order for these companies to take control of these airwaves and use them for cellphones and what-have-you the analog signal had to be cleared from the airwaves.
The only reason the government was able to do this was with a partially funded mandate, which was to force all analog signal consumers and all analog signal broadcasters to switch to a digital signal. The reason why that would work because in theory you could compress the same number of broadcast stations into the smaller remaining bandwith, provided that they were digitally encoded signals that would be decoded by a digital reciever.
So, the answer to your question is this, this isn't about DTV. This is about a problem that the government created of having sold the analog spectrum that is currently being used for analog TV broadcasts to companies that want to use something else. The government believes that a DTV switchover is the solution to this problem, so they are trying to get the majority of consumers and broadcasters to switch to DTV as soon as possible. That's why they are giving away coupons from the Commerce Department, and running ADs that say "you must switch to DTV."
I also believe that a lot of retailers were hoping that the confusion created in non-technical users regarding DTV was going to drive HD-TV sales, but that's a totally seperate issue.
Of course, the economy doesn't look quite the same now as it did when this switchover was originally mandated for 2009, and that's probably the real reason why there is talk of delaying the changeover.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
The analogy between the situations is pretty weak.
1) Was Obama ever president of Clearwire? No. Some guy lobbying Obama (not even in his administration) is an executive v.p. of Clearwire.
2) Is the Obama administration going to give Clearwire billions of dollars? No. It's going to make a decision that arstechnica argues might help Clearwire by delaying a competitor.
3) Did Clearwire overcharge the government $1 Billion in "the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career" according to a govt. contract officer with 20 years of experience? No. (It's not even possible, since Clearwire isn't getting a payoff from taxpayers).
So equating the two situations only shows that your judgement is clouded by partisanship.