[10505] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Debating the NII "Truisms"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (James Love)
Fri Feb 25 17:34:53 1994
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 1994 20:15:29 -0500 (EST)
From: James Love <love@essential.org>
To: "Glenn S. Tenney" <tenney@netcom.com>
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <199402132054.MAA00169@netcom9.netcom.com>
As a number of persons have indicated, the government has long provided a
great deal of "content," for public consumption. The comparative
advantages of the government and the non-government sectors are based
upon a number of items. In the area of statistics, it is often the case
that people perfer government versions, over private versions. Anyone
who works on public policy advocacy knows the *power* of an offical
statistic on something, no matter how it was put together. Someone's
opinion about what a federal judicial opinions says is interesting, and
often useful, but its important to read the source (the government
document), before drawing too many conclusions about anything.
I beleive that one reason why government statistics are so popular is
that the democratic process is a good system for determining how to
measure things. People can find out what the methodologies are, and
technical issues can be debated and resolved. jamie
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James Love, Taxpayer Assets Project; internet: love@essential.org
P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036; v. 202/387-8030; f. 202/234-5176
12 Church Road, Ardmore, PA 19003; v. 215/658-0880; f. 215/649-4066
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