The Clinton Administration came to office promising to create a new
National Information Infrastructure (NII). Now, a year later, the
program is beginning to take shape.
Although details have yet to be worked out, it is already clear
that the administration hopes to accomplish its goals by tapping the
energy and capital of private-marketplace interests in order to serve
the public interest. That course reflects administration reading of
budgetary, political, and technical reality, but it also requires
walking a policy razor's-edge. The public interest community, including
research and higher education, must be holding its collective breath.
The Public Interest
In a democracy as large and diverse as ours, defining the public
interest is an imprecise task at best. In Washington, the public
interest is more often claimed than defined. Typically, an interest
group takes a position on an issue. It then argues that, because its
membership represents part of the "public," its position must reflect
the "public interest." The result is a cacophony of voices asserting
differing, sometimes wildly contradictory, positions, all claiming to
represent the public. Common themes and harmony can be hard to discern.
Nonetheless, they exist.
Public interest principles, although expressed in different
language and with different emphases, basically fit into three
categories.
1. Access: "Universal service," a term borrowed from telephony, is
often invoked as a concept that encompasses access. The term seems too
limited, however, and has been hard to define for an NII that will offer
a far more complex and rapidly changing mix of services, not all of
which will everyone have or need access to. For the NII, access has
three aspects.
*
Connectivity to the physical infrastructure: Certainly a basic
concomitant for access of any kind is physical connection, yet even that
has been hard to define in terms of basic needs. An average home or
small business will not require the same type of connectivity as a
supercomputer center or large multinational bank.
*
Access to resources on the infrastructure: Physical access to the
net does not guarantee the ability to get at the resources and services
on the net. Yet clearly by no means do all such information products
fall under some sort of public access requirement. However, some set of
services need to be widely and affordably accessible to define a "public
space of users on the NII."
*
Access as a service provider:
One exciting new potential of the NII is that it gives anyone the
opportunity to be a provider as well as a user. Already, anyone who has
a node on the Internet can be a provider as well as user, and a quick
look at Internet activity would illustrate how widely that capability is
already used. An NII should have that capacity.
2. Information rights: Information rights concern content rather
than conduit but are equally central as conduit-oriented policy to the
NII debate. There are four basic rights:
* The right to information privacy
* Protection of intellectual property
* Freedom of speech
* Access to government information
These rights usually conflict and so create the need for
information policy. Intellectual property, for instance, generates a
conflict between the property rights of information creators and the
public's rights to access information, coupled with the need for
limiting monopolistic power in the marketplace. Privacy policy balances
the rights of protection against a host of other claims, many of which
also have valid public purposes such as law enforcement and freedom of
the press. Similarly, freedom of speech and access to government
information are balanced against conflicting values. Yet all of these
values reflect, in some sense, the public interest.
3. Public applications: Not surprisingly, the political rhetoric
behind the NII and, prior to it, the high-performance computing and
communications initiative have always emphasized public uses of the
network. Public applications justify public intervention, and several
have been raised at times in the debate:
* Research
* Education
* Libraries
* Public health
* Government benefit services
These services are not only public purposes that in some way
justify public policy interest in an NII. They are also services that
involve direct government funding at both the federal and local levels.
Thus government has more direct and generally accepted policy levers
with which to stimulate both the development and use of advanced
communications technology. At the extreme end, research funding agencies
could directly pay for the development of ARPANET and NSFNET because
those networks were designed specifically to serve their research
constituencies. It was when politicians (and the telephone industry)
became aware of nonresearch and noneducation users that they began to
question the legitimacy of National Science Foundation funding for
Internet and began to refer to such support as a "subsidy" (a
politically loaded term that suggests something vaguely shady and not
merited).
Dilemma
The Clinton Administration has clearly chosen to rely on the private
sector to build the NII. The first two points in any administration's
description of its agenda are always the following.
* Encourage private investment in the NII, and
* Promote and protect competition.
Given the history of communications in the United States and
technical reality, as well as the nature of the political alignment in
support of NII, this approach is not surprising or at all unreasonable.
Unlike the case in most other countries, telecommunications in the
United States has grown up from the start as a private sector under
government regulatory oversight. The U.S. experience has been in large
part very successful. The political reality is that no proposal would
succeed that looked as if the government were going to build the
information superhighway in the same way that it built the roadway
highway system--through direct government funding. Furthermore,
technology has undermined many of the assumptions that underlay the old
regulatory system and made it nearly impossible to sustain the system of
controlled tariffs and cross-subsidies through which the old system was
regulated.
Nonetheless, this approach may well present dangers to some or all
of the set of public interest goals for the NII listed previously. The
administration is walking a tightrope in trying to use market mechanisms
to achieve these public ends.
Figure 2 illustrates three balances that have to be struck.
* Concentration: Some argue that the economics of the information
industry favors concentration (the so-called "natural monopoly").
Because fixed costs to build the infrastructure or create the service
are relatively high and variable costs of delivery relatively low, the
firm with the largest market has the clear edge.
Even given that this argument is far too simplistic for a market as
complicated as information services, the general trend lately has
clearly been toward concentration through mergers, strategic alliances,
and the like. This trend helps to pool capital and it helps to build
momentum, both by creating technical standards and by removing the
inevitable political gridlock. Certainly, in the past, competing
services--cable, movies, broadcasters, publishers, and so on--have
viewed the regulatory and legal system as a way to prevent competitors
from gaining an advantage. The difficulty in aligning all the differing
interests into some rough political consensus has presented a major
stumbling block to communications policy reform.
Concentration, though, carries its own dangers, the most obvious
being the threat of monopoly. In the information service sector,
concentration carries not only the threat of monopoly pricing but also
the even more worrisome prospect of creating official or unofficial
gatekeepers to the flow of information. Finally, monopolies and even
oligopolies generally have less incentive to innovate. The
administration has expressed these concerns and reacted by stressing the
need for strong antitrust enforcement in order to encourage competition
(one administration official said he wanted to see a "Jurassic Park" of
competition in the marketplace) and the need for some form of common
carrier requirements to be imposed on the physical conduit providers.
However, the trend toward concentration of providers worries many public
interest advocates.
* Market-driven investment: The only real incentive for the private
sector to make what may be a half-trillion-dollar investment is the
promise of profits in a future information marketplace. Markets, as
economists are constantly reminding us, also are a mechanism to
guarantee efficiency in investments and in the allocation of resources.
However, the public applications listed earlier will not
necessarily constitute a very attractive market for providers. Nor is it
clear that the goal of universal access will be met naturally in the
marketplace, particularly for the poor or those who live in areas or
have needs that cost more to serve. Dollars are the votes the
marketplace depends on for direction, and some people have a lot fewer
votes than others.
There is another, more subtle, danger: that the treatment of
information as a commodity will displace the view of information as a
public resource. People have bought and sold information for centuries,
but we have also had, at the same time, a view of information as a
public good--something to be shared for the benefit of all.
There is room for both values to exist simultaneously,
contradictory as they may seem. After all, in our society, most land is
privately owned and is bought and sold in the private marketplace. Yet,
at the same time, some land is set aside for public, shared use. In some
cases, the land is developed and used for specific institutions, such as
schools and libraries. Sometimes it is developed into parks for the
public. Sometimes it is not developed at all but is simply held in the
public trust as wilderness. In the rush to develop and protect
information markets, we have to be careful to see that public domains
are also preserved.
* Deregulation: No doubt, as the administration has pointed out
many times, the current regulatory system could become a major drag on
plans to move ahead with an NII. The structure of regulations based on
outdated technology and obsolete models of the industry can impede
innovation and the development of new services. Furthermore, decades of
rule-making and infighting among the lawyers have created a maze of
restrictions and regulation that industries have learned to use to slow
down new products and protect their markets.
The administration has talked about streamlining regulation and
eliminating unnecessary barriers. That would be a welcome stimulant to
new investment in the NII. However, if not done very carefully,
deregulation could also remove one of the few levers government has to
ensure that public interest concerns be protected.
The conclusion is not necessarily that regulation, at least in the
traditional sense, should be reinstituted but that those who advance
public interest values will need to dream up other policy approaches.
The same old levers won't be there to pull.
Higher Education
Higher education has many stakes of its own in this issue and needs to
see that its interests are both articulated and developed and that the
colleges and universities have a strong voice in the debate over the
NII. The research and education networks developed and run in part by
academic researchers have shown the way to the NII vision.
Higher education will be a major user of an NII. But most
important, it has the chance to be a crucial part of the information
infrastructure as the source of many of those public services and
resources that the public interest vision of the NII espouses.
Fred W. Weingarten is executive director of Computing Research
Association.
Figure one
Public Interest
Access
* Connectivity
* Access to resources
* Access as provider
Information rights
* Privacy
* Property
* Freedom of speech
* Access to public information
Public applications
* Research
* Education
* Libraries
* Public health
* Government benefit services