Information Please

Martin Morse Wooster from the March 1994 issue

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Gilder cheers a recent FCC ruling that allows such competitors to the telephone companies as Electronic Data Systems, Shell, and McDonnell Douglas to buy as much "dark fiber" as they want. He feels this will stimulate a continuing fall in communications charges, which will encourage entrepreneurial drive and initiative.

"In a regime of boundless bandwidths and computational abundance, the key scarce resource will be the human mind," Gilder concludes. "Contributing the bulk of the value added and gaining most of the profits, human creativity will become ever more valuable and more highly rewarded. Slipping inexorably away into the trackless realms of human minds, economic activity will become ever harder to regulate, tax, or control."

One need not agree with every point Gilder makes (particularly when he slips into techno-mysticism) to conclude that his basic ideas are sound. It's clear that computers have freed people rather than enslaved them, and that forthcoming changes in the information world will encourage decentralization rather than strengthen hierarchy. "Infopreneurs" may not be scruffy bikers, but they'll be as free to live in Louisville or Bozeman as in Silicon Valley or Manhattan. Indeed, one consequence of the information superhighway may well be an increased pride in regional identity; if there's no need to move to a big city to do your work, you won't have to live like a rootless urban sophisticate.

But one can never underestimate the power of government to ruin the future, so one must be wary of the Clinton administration's proposals for the information superhighway. It's hard to tell what these plans are, since they vary day by day. But there are certainly some questions about the information net that the Clintonites ought to address.

How, for example, will copyright laws be enforced in the electronic age? As Evan Schwartz notes in the November 22 Publisher's Weekly, some publishing firms are already putting works on the net, using "electronic bookstores" that can collect fees from users. At least one company, Wide Area Information Services, sells software that allows large users (Sun Microsystems, the Environmental Protection Agency) to post and retrieve large documents from the net and conduct keyword searches to find desired information. But without a reliable method of enforcing copyrights and ensuring that artists and authors get their royalties, there will be very little incentive for anyone to be creative.

And as Eliza Newlin Carney reports in the November 20 National Journal, nonprofits and liberal lobbyists (including such unlikely groups as the National Coalition on Black Voter Participation) have formed the Telecommunications Policy Roundtable, which Carney says wants to make sure that schools and the poor can get the information they need--or, as lobbyist John M. Lawson put it, to make sure that no one will "end up as `road kill' on the information superhighway."

These fears are misguided. The history of computing is a continuing saga of better goods being offered at lower prices. If trends continue, information may not be free, but it will certainly be cheaper than telephone service or cable television. If the government allows market forces to do their job, the information net will end up making Americans freer, happier, and more self-reliant than they were before computers became commonplace.