[10575] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Debating the NII "Truisms"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Sun Feb 27 06:48:19 1994
Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 16:32:51 -0500
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: STAPLETON@bpa.arizona.edu
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: The future Ross Stapleton-Gray's message of Sat, 12 Feb 1994 13:02:54 -0700 (MST) <940212130254.2180281a@BPA.ARIZONA.EDU>
>From: The future Ross Stapleton-Gray <STAPLETON@bpa.arizona.edu>
> "If intellectual property rights aren't preserved, no one is going
> to put any information on the 'information superhighway.'"
>
> "If information is made free, you'll end up getting what you pay for."
> (sort of a corollary to the first)
>
> "We are in danger of becoming a nation of information 'haves' and
> 'have-nots.'"
>
>The first statement is patently (no pun intended!) false, at least as
>reflected by the growth in the content of the Internet alone.
>"If intellectual property rights aren't preserved, no one is going
> to put any information on the 'information superhighway.'"
>
> "If information is made free, you'll end up getting what you pay for."
> (sort of a corollary to the first)
>
> "We are in danger of becoming a nation of information 'haves' and
> 'have-nots.'"
>
>The first statement is patently (no pun intended!) false, at least as
>reflected by the growth in the content of the Internet alone.
Well, of course it's false, I agree.
But is it the information we need? Are there serious holes in that
information? Are patterns of "free" information discernible that tends
to limit them to certain niches, even if they are very voluminous
niches?
Might we be confusing quantity with quality, an easy confusion to make
(remember those "cup and a half of flavor" coffee ads? I used to
always crack gee, I'd prefer one cup of flavor and that it be good.)
I'd say yes to all of the above.
Take my project, the Online Book Initiative. We have around 1GB of
freely redistributable text materials available for the taking (anon
ftp or gopher to world.std.com.)
But we can only deal in non-copyrighted or otherwise redistributable
material.
Can we say look, OBI has more text then most people read in a
lifetime, therefore there is no problem?
I think that's what you're saying in a way.
But what about current information? We can't touch it. What about
current authors? Interesting books on current events? Those that
appear in the Times best-seller lists? We can't touch it.
Well, we can't touch it with the current model, obviously setting
something up to honor the property rights (i.e. charge and pay) would
be fine.
But let's not confuse these two situations and say there's lots of
stuff on the net so surely information can be made free. It's a false
conclusion leaping from mere volume to a judgement on quality or
usefulness for a particular purpose.
>That
>said, there is a considerable threat to the established information
>services industry as an erosion of the barriers that have made
>information more a "packaged" commodity than can be fairly tangibly
>handled. The interpretation of that statement tends to suggest "the
>future ought to look just like the present," though, and that's all but
>impossible.
I agree that it will change profoundly.
Many of the current information services industry corps are basically
in the same position that the mainframe makers were when the killer
micros hit the market. They're probably trying to preserve a world
that's rapidly disappearing and things like intellectual property laws
won't help them if they don't change the way they do business.
Information ages, and the new information will be sold differently and
based on different business models.
>Even if IPR *weren't* preserved, the "information
>superhighway" would likely end up looking like a very rich craft fair,
>rather than an enormous mass market, or a barren wasteland.
There will certainly be more of this.
But I don't think we can count out those who make high-quality
information available at a price.
>imagine if the Dept. of Education chartered a
>national free encyclopedia, and built its content through annual
>competitions for what would turn out to be very modest contracts when
>weighed against the whole of the population that might benefit.
I could imagine:
We'd probably have massive politics surrounding the thing in
perpetuum.
Religious nut-groups fighting to remove creationism from it from the
start.
Mapplethorpe won't appear anywhere in it.
Jesse Helms will try to get his boys into positions of power in the
program. So will a lot of other people with questionable motives.
Words like AIDS and Abortion will be glossed over in the most neutral
and cryptic way possible.
Vietnam will be described as a positive foreign policy experience.
There will be nothing useful about Joe McCarthy, radiation testing on
humans, Spiro Agnew, Japanese detention camps in WWII, operation
Phoenix, Irangate.
The end of Nixon's administration and how it came to be will sound a
whole lot like Nixon or his PR firm might describe it ("finally, for
the best of the nation and to end the divisiveness this controversy
was causing Richard Nixon decided to resign voluntarily and let the
country and its govt get back to the very important business he knew
deserved more attention")
There will be endless fighting by various interest groups about how
they will be represented.
The section on the national deficit and its possible implications
or how it came to be will be exceedingly cryptic.
Words like sado-masochism, homosexuality, transvestitism,
transsexuality will not appear even to define the terms.
KEEP THE GOVT OUT OF THE CONTENT BUSINESS! For your own and everyone
else's sake.
>Is the problem really the danger of information "haves" or "have-nots,"
>or is it something more fundamental?
That's a problem. But I'd hardly suggest that the way to make
newspapers more available to the poor would be to have the govt print
and edit them. How about you?
Don't you think it works out better when the public library just
subscribes to a bunch of them and lets people browse them for free
then the idea that the public libraries would produce those
newspapers?
>All the information in the
>world won't do you a bit of good when the crack dealer next door
>decides to rob you for money to get a fix;
Actually, that's not true. I've been robbed, mugged in my life and I
still think information is useful. Your middle-class sensibilities are
showing thru, there's worse things possible than having someone take
your pocket money off of you, in the big picture (I know, but what if
he KILLS you, yeah, well, but you didn't say that.)
>all of the interactive
>training videos in the world won't help if there are no jobs, and
>if you've got to hold several minimum-wage ones all of your waking
>hours just to afford to eat, let alone watch TV.
Well, that's true, and needs to be worked on independently. But it'd
hardly hurt (unless we divert our attentions too much.)
>(I'm actually more
>inclined to take Neil Postman's position, that there's a glut of
>information in danger of swamping any of us...)
Yeah? So, are you going to organize it all for us for free?
Let's face it, either information is valuable or it is not. We can't
have it both ways.
-Barry Shein
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