Most equipment and network providers believe that entertainment will finance the superhighway and that video-on-demand, VOD, is the driving force or killer app of our wired future. I do not disagree with this view, but I marvel at the short-sighted, incomplete, and outright misleading conclusion drawn from it … Videocassette-rental stores will go out of business within a decade.
What happens when you combine media voyeurism, technological exhibitionism, and strategic simulations? News flash: In the 21st century Army, you get the cyber-deterrent … The cyber-deterrent is fast, digitized, and is as spectacular in simulation as it is global in effect … the digitized option has the added advantage of being out of reach of all but the richest rogues. And it makes a hell of a photo-op. Digitization, making ever more convincing simulations possible, seems destined to replace an increasingly irrelevant nuclear balance of terror with a simulation of superiority. Moreover, the digitized deterrence machine bears an important similarity to its nuclear counterpart: it does not necessarily have to work to be effective.
Today the Industrial Age is being superseded by the Information Age, the Third Wave, hard on the heels of the agrarian and industrial eras. Our present army is well-configured to fight and win in the late Industrial Age, and we can handle Agrarian-Age foes as well. We have begun to move into Third Wave warfare, to evolve a new force for a new century.
By pushing companies to offer network services at something like the cost of providing them – instead of a fictional price connived for social convenience – regulators can put networks on a sound economic footing, and so make them independent of the whims of politics and subsidy. By requiring entrenched giants to provide basic technology to others as they provide it unto themselves, regulators can set free the vast investments already made in telecom infrastructure for expansion and innovation, and so fulfill the public trust that built them. By allowing innovation to rise or fall on its own merits – rather than because of lobbyists’ pressure – regulators can enable Americans to choose for themselves.
All of the telecom-reform legislation surfacing in 1994 contains a mixture of subsidies, service regulation, and competition. The same combination will probably recur in any future legislation, because each satisfies different and opposing interest groups … Unfortunately, competition and subsidized, regulated network services are profoundly incompatible, and universal service stands at the heart of the contradictions. To introduce competition without a complete overhaul of the universal-service funding mechanism would simply bankrupt those providing it. By trying not to disappoint anybody, politicians may yet disappoint everybody.
Mandating universal service requires regulators to decide what services people should have and what prices they should pay. Regulation focused on open access, on the other hand, protects people’s abilities to decide for themselves. Open access regulation is not deregulation. On the contrary, it requires the government to intervene vigorously – particularly to ensure that small, new competitors get to use the existing telecom infrastructure on the same terms as the entrenched (soon-to-be former) monopolies that built it. This is both more difficult and more politically thankless than throwing subsidies at popular services.
A return to the traditions of universal service – to services defined by government mandate, often made cheap by cross-subsidy – may bring back more of the past than even its staunchest supporters would like: equality, yes, but also fewer choices, fewer and bigger companies, and fewer opportunities for innovation. It could, in fact, derail the entire information economy … Universal service is profoundly incompatible with another major item on politicians’ reform agenda: the introduction of competition into telecom markets … It is time to bury universal service – to bury it slowly, gently, and with great care to preserve both its spirit and its many achievements.
The institutions of journalism seem in desperate need of some mechanism for re-connecting with an alienated public, and they needn’t transform themselves into online publications to do it. An e-mail address on every reporter’s stories would help. And gain journalists countless news sources as well.
The young are busy and mobile. They like their media with attitude and lots of point-of-view … Interactive media, from Nintendo to computer games to call-in talk shows – even channel zapping – is not a futuristic notion but the only kind of media they know, the kind they patronize and expect.
Newspapers … should, at last, accept that there is little of significance they get to tell us for the first time. They should stop hiding that fact and begin taking advantage of it. What they can do is explain news, analyze it, dig into the details and opinions, capture people and stories in vivid writing – all in greater depth than other media. They should get about the business of doing so.