The value of information about information can be greater than the value of the information itself. From that and other similar observations, I am willing to project an enormous new industry based on a service that helps navigate through massive amounts of data.
The NII would scarcely be worth building if it offered no more than 500 channels of MTV, no matter how holographic, ambient, and jacked in to the gills. Its real payoff, its visionary promise, would be the possibility of an “Athens without slaves” or a “Jeffersonian democracy” in which people can provide information as easily as they consume it. A networked world offers the possibility of many-to-many communication, permitting widely separated individuals to bind themselves into collectives.
A myriad of magazines and information services feed our society with information, and kiosks sell them. I think that is what is going to come to be the norm in electronic markets.
The networks are getting to the complexity point where humans are not capable of dealing with them any more. Automation of network administration and the automation of the building of networks and the automation of the managing of networks is a huge area of opportunity because it’s beyond anyone’s capability to deal with.
I view the Internet as the correct model. It is a set of roads and highways with a total laissez faire kind of glue around it. There really isn’t any management per se. And so I think that’s a much more viable model for how the world is going to evolve than, say, CompuServe, America Online, or services like Prodigy, where there’s a highly visible control structure, with a signature look and feel.
The people who dealt with print design are now becoming video designers. They’re learning how to use the tools and to express ideas in a time domain. But that’s the transition that will be slow. The world will not just go from print to multimedia overnight. The number of designers who can deal with print media is huge. The number in the video world is much smaller because video production has been so expensive. That is getting democratized too … Technology has liberated designers from a craft-skill requirement, and work can be done by a much broader group of people. As the cost of media tools comes down, the same thing is going to happen with video that happened with desktop design for print.
The shift of information from a paper archive to an electronic one does mean that people won’t read as much stuff off of paper. But they certainly won’t store or send most information that way. There will still be local printing, still copies of reports that you’ll take into your study, still books you’ll read in bed at night. There may be a growing appreciation for fine books. After 500 years of tradition and success, paper is certainly not going to just go away, but the all-consuming, tree-consumptive aspect of paper used as a transportation medium for information is on the verge of going away because of the ongoing emergence of computers that integrate sound, video, and print.
The information superhighway might be cynically described as a way to charge more for television, without necessarily improving content quality. But if consumer behavior toward CDs serves as a valid precedent, the “higher quantum level” pricing of the information could reward content rather than access, opening new markets, increasing diversity, and giving consumers more of what they really want. The superhighway might differ from intentions, even if the intention is schlock.
All of the telecom-reform legislation surfacing in 1994 contains a mixture of subsidies, service regulation, and competition. The same combination will probably recur in any future legislation, because each satisfies different and opposing interest groups … Unfortunately, competition and subsidized, regulated network services are profoundly incompatible, and universal service stands at the heart of the contradictions. To introduce competition without a complete overhaul of the universal-service funding mechanism would simply bankrupt those providing it. By trying not to disappoint anybody, politicians may yet disappoint everybody.
Mandating universal service requires regulators to decide what services people should have and what prices they should pay. Regulation focused on open access, on the other hand, protects people’s abilities to decide for themselves. Open access regulation is not deregulation. On the contrary, it requires the government to intervene vigorously – particularly to ensure that small, new competitors get to use the existing telecom infrastructure on the same terms as the entrenched (soon-to-be former) monopolies that built it. This is both more difficult and more politically thankless than throwing subsidies at popular services.