Topic: Getting

Public libraries and public interest groups … have argued that basic government-generated information should be made available directly, without adding value, to the user, either for free or at the cost of documentation. Given that the government has already incurred the costs of creating and processing the information for governmental purposes, the economic benefit to society is maximized when government information is publicly disseminated at the cost of dissemination to both end users and value-added redistributors … Internet dissemination may help to explore opportunities for reconceptualizing the kind as well as the form and delivery of information of broad public interest, allowing the government, commercial providers, and the public to move beyond the form and content of “government information” based on traditional printed packages.

For decades, publishers and commercial information services providers also have been exploring ways to create, produce, and deliver information over networks … Controls on access and use are very important to these businesses, as is the ability to charge for access and use. Funding for the digitization and electronic supply of noncommercial materials is an ongoing concern facing both publishers and consumers of those materials in the research and education communities.

How network and information access are priced will affect the ability of new users and communities to engage with the information infrastructure. Linking access and service to ability to pay would be inherently exclusionary. This problem lies behind consumer group and state regulatory efforts to moderate the pace of infrastructure advances and tariff changes.

For the research and education communities in particular, an increasing emphasis on network-based access to information raises questions about whether there is a need for a minimum level of access – and what that level is, how basic it is in terms of the quality of service (speed, support for video or multimedia, and so on), the locus of access (on each desk or in each classroom or in such communal and institutional facilities as libraries), and the breadth of reach (within a state or region, national and/ or international, connections to which information provider gateways, and so on).

Tomorrow it is clear that the mix of services will change in two ways. First, the format will change; there will be more video, audio, multimedia, and real-time services, in contrast to the flat text and binary data files that dominate Internet traffic today. Second, there will be more third-party providers of information, which will be offered on a free or at-cost basis by government and on a revenue-generating/profit-making basis by commercial providers.