ON Feb. 17, 2009, all broadcast television stations will end their analog transmissions and shift to digital signals. This is a complex process that involves spending billions of dollars to build new towers and antennas and to subsidize converter boxes for consumers who don’t have digital TVs. In all this planning and spending on the transition to digital transmission, however, we have yet to address the question of “white spaces.” White spaces are the intervals between television channel frequencies to ensure that TV reception is not interrupted by other signals. The usefulness of these white spaces is about to be...