Pointing to the Bell Atlantic-TCI merger, Johnson anticipates, “absolutely overpowering” political pressure on Washington to let the Big Guys run the Superhighway any way they want.
Predictor: Johnson, Nick
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Common Cause magazine, Deborah Baldwin quotes Nick Johnson, a consumer advocate and former member of the Federal Communications Commission. Baldwin writes: ”Attempting to take root under the Information Superhighway’s grow lights today are a handful of groups, ranging from Ralph Nader’s tiny Taxpayer Assets Project to the brash Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was bankrolled by the inventor of Lotus software. There’s the 20-year-old Media Access Project – still lobbying to bring back the Fairness Doctrine – and the Consumer Federation of America, which wants to protect consumers from gouging by the regional Bell operating companies, or RBOCs, which are anxious to get into fancy new lines of work like video. Add the 14-year-old Benton Foundation, the 2-year-old Center for Media Education and the nascent Center for Policy Alternatives and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Also active are the librarians … who have provided the contemporary media reform movement with some of its few female leaders … Galvanizing this eclectic group is the sheer size and political clout of the opposition, a composite of media-communications-entertainment interests about as consumer-friendly as the Terminator. The RBOCs alone – collectively, individually – comprise a fantastic political force both in Washington and locally, where they badger regulators for rate hikes and sweet-talk about getting schools and hospitals onto the highway … ‘When you talk about the phone companies you are talking about political power unlike any other,’ says Nick Johnson, a consumer advocate who served on the Federal Communications Commission in the early ’70s. Pointing to the Bell Atlantic-TCI merger, Johnson anticipates, ‘absolutely overpowering’ political pressure on Washington to let the Big Guys run the Superhighway any way they want.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Role of Govt./Industry
Name of publication: Common Cause Magazine
Title, headline, chapter name: If This is the Information Superhighway, Where Are the Rest Stops?
Quote Type: Paraphrase
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=6bb2902898a52d79b267d142a1ee1117&_docnum=4&wchp=dGLbVtb-lSlzV&_md5=1deffb71b371e0594dffd3c2bd0c9685
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney