It’s not encrypted but compression and reliability of the signal is a mixed bag. It’s not encrypted because congress mandated it as a condition for privatizing the analog bandwidth (ie there’s a carve out for public digital and broadcasters have to broadcast publicly accessible signal just like they had to on analog)
Not really a power move but public broadcast will probably disappear at some point in a boiling the frog kind of way, but it’s definitely being starved and killed by corporate interests.
