Copyright c 1994 by Nicholas Johnson Des Moines [Iowa] Register, Tuesday, February 1, 1994, p. 7A. Iowa View/Nicholas Johnson Road Kill Along the Information Highway As an electronics hobbyist (ham radio and computers) I'm itching to take a spin on the "information superhighway." But the current hype is troublesome. Computer conferencing and email over phone lines have been part of my life since the late 1970s. Sending computer files through the air from one amateur radio station to another is my idea of fun. Over ten years ago I was hosting the PBS' program "New Tech Times" and writing a syndicated column called "Communications Watch." This is relevant because the concerns that follow are not those of someone who is fearful of the electronics age or can't program a VCR to stop flashing 12:00. 1. What's new? We are told the information superhighway will enable us to see the person we are talking to ("video phone"), send and receive faxes, connect our home computers to libraries, universities and mainframe computers around the world. We will be able to shop, write checks, buy and sell stock and make airline reservations from home. Assuming millions of Americans are demanding such services (and most pilot projects indicate they're not), everything just described you can do from home today. Shouldn't we learn to play with the toys we have before we buy more? 2. Other options. Much of the "computer revolution" does not even require today's telecommunications system. Imagine you or your children being able to navigate from home a 29-volume electronic encyclopedia, plus 1000 more articles, eight hours of sound (including 60 languages), 7800 photos and illustrations, 100 animations and video clips, 800 maps, and more. A Twenty- First Century miracle? No, a quite affordable CD-ROM disk today (Microsoft's "Encarta"). Any child can operate it on most of the home computers now sold -- and they won't even tie up your phone line! There are many other technological "trade offs" to multi-billion-dollar telecommunications networks. 3. Who pays? Thelma and Edna like to visit by phone every morning. Neither has a home computer or cable television. Their needs would be well served with analog signals and black, rotary dial phones connected by a twisted pair of copper wires into a crossbar switch -- and a monthly phone bill of $3.50. That's what "the phone company" provided all of us not that many years ago. Why should our grandmothers have to pay $20 to $50 a month so we can have an optic fiber, full-motion video on 500 channels, and digital everything? 4. Equipment costs. We already have disparities between the "information rich" and "information poor." Functional illiteracy, unequal school budgets and poverty make a poor foundation for democracy at home and competitiveness abroad. Will our modern multimedia moguls lay their "super fiber" in the poor sections of town? Cable companies didn't -- until forced to. Even if they do, what then? From home you can get electronic, instantaneous access to the full text of hundreds of newspapers and magazines now (Mead Data's "Nexis"). A great research tool? You bet. But to get it you need much more than a telephone line. You need a computer setup (say, $1000 to $3000), a modem, and ability to pay as much as $200 an hour for the service. Dozens of such $2000 boxes of miracles are to fiber what our washing machines and refrigerators are to the electric power line. There's feeble talk of "universal access" for the poor. But an unconnected fiber sure won't provide them -- or the rest of us -- free equipment or pay the monthly "information bills." 5. Free speech. If we're not careful, the information superhighway may also remove the last vestiges of First Amendment rights for ordinary citizens. Media firms are scrambling to buy up motion picture studios and other producers of entertainment and information. They predict there will someday only be five such global firms, and they want to be one of them. (There are already five firms that control over 90 percent of the world's music.) That's scary enough. But meanwhile, the Supreme Court says that a major media owner's right to speak includes the constitutional power to censor others. If phone companies are limited to providing conduits for others' speech, and forbidden to own information, competition will flourish in the marketplace of ideas. But they want to own the information as well, and few officials seem prepared to stop them. Once they provide both content and conduit, and thereby gain censorship rights, the public will lose its last free speech mass medium. There's lots of road kill and dozens of washed out bridges and warning signs along the information superhighway. But these five should be enough for most of us to think twice before racing up the on ramp. _______________ Nicholas Johnson, a former Federal Communications Commissioner, teaches at the University of Iowa College of Law. _______________ *** Copyright c 1994 by Nicholas Johnson. Conditions: This material is copyright by Nicholas Johnson. However, permission is hereby granted to download, copy and distribute the text to others if (1) the text is not altered, and (2) there is no charge to the recipient, and (3) this copyright notice and conditions are attached. It is a copyright violation to distribute this material altered, or without the copyright notice and conditions attached, or to use the material in any way for which remuneration is received without the prior permission of Nicholas Johnson. 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