The foot soldiers of the Obama transition have already made it to the Federal Communications Commission.
Chairman Kevin J. Martin, a Republican, met with Obama’s FCC agency review team at least once in recent days, he said in a chat with reporters on Wednesday. But Martin declined to provide details, saying he’d forgotten to ask Obama’s folks if he could discuss the meeting publicly.
Though Martin stayed mum on the subject, it’s easy to guess what the President-elect’s FCC transition squad is worrying about first: Obama will inherit a grand scale communications upgrade like the country has never seen during his first month in office — and all of the trouble that could come with it.
The nationwide shutdown of analog broadcasting is scheduled for Feb. 17 — after the much-watched Super Bowl, but before heavily-viewed March Madness — and that’s only 29 days after Obama takes office.
On that date, consumers that rely on analog over-the-air broadcasts will see their televisions go dark unless they buy and set up government-subsidized hardware to update their TVs. Recent government data shows that while people have been buying converter boxes, most television markets have a long way to go to prepare consumers before February.
As a result, the transition could be a huge headache for the new president in his first month in office, a reality that Democrats in Congress began to take notice of months ago.
“The digital TV transition has the potential to cause serious disruption not just to consumers, but to a new president who will just be getting his feet wet,” said Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee at that panel’s last digital transition oversight hearing of the year in Sept.
The FCC and its sister agency, the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, are choreographing the digital transition, with help from industry.
The agencies are likely working to get the chief architects of the FCC transition — Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach — up to speed on the issue. The digital transition surely isn’t news to them: both are communications policy scholars from prestigious universities, and telecommunications circles have been discussing the digital switch in one shape or form for over a decade.
The two will mastermind the makeup of the next five-member FCC, which will switch to a Democratic majority after inauguration and acquire an influential Democratic chairman to replace Martin. With the digital transition so close, Obama may want to appoint a new FCC chief as quickly as possible to oversee it, telecommunications analysts suspect. That, or Martin could be asked to stay on through February.
— Adrianne Kroepsch
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