Investors and early adopters pay for the innovations that fail, as well as the successful ones like fax. They should continue to do so, because progress comes from innovations unknowable in the time frame of Gore's vision: Apple Computer, Microsoft, and the PC itself have all existed for less than the estimated 20 years it would take to bring fiber-optic cable to every home in the United States. Undoubtedly, there is more than one goateed cyberpunk tinkering in his garage right now, looking for a better way. As long as there are geeks with a dollar to spend today on what will cost 50 cents tomorrow, just to be the first in their Usenet group to have it, new ideas will continue to germinate. Once government committees have the power to decide what society will need, the process of innovation will die.
To the level-playing-field crowd, letting some people have something all of us don't just isn't fair. As if free home access to Nexis and Dialog would miraculously provide jobs for the poor, these folks worry that "electronic redlining" will keep such high-priced services only in the offices of law firms, investment banks, and other rich users, totally ignoring the rapid erosion of information services prices. Nothing short of mandating fiber-optic lines to every home will do. Even if a planned solution were technologically feasible, would this zero-sum, slice-of-the-information-pie policy work?
Not a chance, says Jeff Eisenach, president of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a Washington think tank. "The problem in America today is not information have-nots, it's information want-nots," he notes. "Before we start putting a computer in every home, we have to create a culture in which people want the information a computer would provide."
He may be right. A television, today's prime source of information and entertainment, can be found in upwards of 99 percent of American homes, higher even than the 93 percent of homes with a phone. Without a hint of government subsidy--let alone a domestic producer--TV reaches more homes than telephones, despite six decades of sweeping universal telephone service policy courtesy of the Communications Act of 1934. Today, as computer price-to-performance ratios plunge, a used computer and modem can be had for prices equal to or less than a TV, with basic access to today's online world about $9.00 per month. And, like virtually everything else in the high-tech arena, those prices are falling.
If "universal service" meant that buyers and sellers would be ensured access to each other (as with today's access to a variety of long-distance phone service providers) and that, perhaps, we would ask how best to get even one modem into every school (even without asking why they don't have them already), then Washington would have made the first small steps in the right direction.
It's a positive sign that Vice President Gore's rhetoric seems to have evolved in its own right, away from the class-conscious, entitlement-creating "haves and have-nots" of early 1994 to at least the potential for deep reform. In January, Gore suggested that what's needed is "the courage to throw out the regulated monopoly model that we've used for more than 60 years and instead create a truly competitive marketplace." But the rhetorical rubber has yet to meet the legislative road, and the potential for serious mischief, such as domestic-content requirements, remains.
More important, as long as the debate echoes with "on-ramps to the Information Superhighway" and other Machine Age images, Democrats and Republicans alike remain conceptually limited to policies that, at best, will produce a horseless carriage. Lacking an appropriate Information Age metaphor--economy as ecosystem--policy prescriptions inevitably ring with class consciousness and zero-sum thinking. Until the political mindset matches the organic reality of the Infoweb, the best we can hope for is a short waitlist for our e-Trabant.
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