$70 billion giveaway. April Fool's Day joke? Taxpayers can only wish.

In the 19th Century, Uncle Sam gave a treasure of land to railroad robber barons. In the 21st Century version, the federal government will give away broadcast spectrum to television networks. One set of losers will be potential spectrum users including, telecommunication companies and independent television stations who had lined up to write checks to Uncle Sam at a proposed auction. The other losers are taxpayers who could have reaped up to $70 billion from an auction.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will release its plan in the next few days to give networks over sixty channels on the new spectrum as authorized by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Networks tout the giveaway as a way to maintain free over-the-air television during the industry's transition to High Definition television (HDTV), but concede that they could pay for use of the spectrum and still give consumers free TV. Furthermore, networks can profit by using this second set of channels for anything they want, including telephone service.

The best taxpayers can now hope for is to generate relatively small change for federal coffers from broadcast spectrum auctions sometime in the future.

As if the networks' free use of the public's airwaves for their own profit isn't enough, networks oppose attempts to give political candidates free airtime on the new spectrum. Recently, campaign finance reformers including the Media Access Project, suggested that networks give candidates free airtime in exchange for receiving the new spectrum.