The Dawn of Digital

Slate (via Yglesias) has a great look at the long, winding history of digital television becoming a reality, and the advantages of moving to digital for all of us:

For all these problems, there are a couple of amazing advantages to digital TV, benefits that you hardly hear about in the apocalyptic coverage of the transition. The first one: The switch is going to free up a vast share of public airwaves that can be used for much better things than TV. Last year, the government auctioned off the "spectrum" that TV stations will give up once they stop broadcasting analog signals. Verizon and AT&T won the radio space, though Google, in its first big foray into lobbying, managed to convince the Federal Communications Commission to require that the telecom companies keep the new space "open"—meaning that they can't restrict what software or hardware customers use on the airwaves. As a result of the switch, we'll soon get a much better wireless Internet—wider coverage, faster downloads, and with fewer restrictions. That's much more worthwhile than a snowy local channel showing reruns of Golden Girls.

For those of you not familiar with the coup that Google tried to pull in the bidding for the rights to the opening of the 700-MHz spectrum, definitely read up. Ignoring Bob Cringely's random iPod hate thrown in the middle of the column, his suspicion of what Google was trying to pull off sounds like an interesting alternative reality:

Forget about net neutrality and forget about making nice-nice with broadband ISPs OR phone companies. Google would overnight become the largest U.S. ISP with direct and very high-performance access to its customers, including those using the new Google Phone or any other phone that supports WiFi connections, like the iPhone and many others. Google becomes the biggest and lowest-cost ISP and potentially the biggest and lowest-cost mobile phone company in the bargain.

Loosening the death-grip the telecom industry is trying to entrap people in? Yes please. Sure it didn't happen, but as long as someone is keeping the trenched establishment in check I can sleep a little more soundly at night. If conservatives want to keep us from the "socialist state" some claim we are becoming, they need to help encourage capitalist competition like Google was trying to create.