I'd assume that the groups being mentioned are various Libertarian groups who tend to oppose any government expense/program on general principle. The Republican party is going to look at the benefits and costs and in this case, it does make a heck of a lot of sense.
Jophiel wrote:
Three billion is a hell of a lot of money. I fail to see how the government isn't able to sell off the wavelengths without buying everyone a converter. One isn't really required to do the other at all.
Actually, while I'm not 100% on this, I seem to recall that there are laws/regulations/whatever requiring that "broadcast" TV be available to everyone. I'm sure if we dug into the bowels of the charters for the original broadcast networks, we could figure out the details, but basically due to the way it's regulated the network broadcasts have to be available to anyone with a basic TV. And since not all TVs can handle a digital signal, they can't redo the broadcast frequency ranges without making sure everyone can recieve the new ranges and decode them properly.
At least part of this probably has to do with tying the networks into the whole emergency broadcast system as well. Just like phone service, TV is considered part of that system and is subsidized to some extent as a result. So yeah. I think there is a requirement that everyone have access to this stuff. I couldn't nail down where the regulation or law is, but I would assume it must be there or they'd not go through the trouble of spending the 3 billion.