I am also firmly committed to a deregulatory, market-oriented approach in defining clearly, at last, the meaning of the public interest. That is why I feel so strongly that we should eliminate vague rules that enrich lobbyists and allow for unaccountable ad hoc decisionmaking. And we should replace them with clear, unambiguous, concrete and tradeable duties for those who use the public property of the airwaves. We need to ask whether the FCC's digital television plan proves the point. The FCC's plan was first developed in response to the Japanese industrial policy of promoting of high-definition television.
Most observers call Japan's policy a flop.
Nevertheless, the FCC has continued to pursue its own high-definition scheme. Under the original proposal, each of the nation's existing TV stations would be given an additional 6 MHz chunk of spectrum. This high resolution picture would presumably be so attractive that Americans would naturally elect to purchase new high-definition televisions. Then standard NTSC TVs would be abandoned and today's analog spectrum could be returned to the public and used for other purposes. Therefore, the scheme was labelled a transition, and the new spectrum was called a second channel.