Computers, Communications, and Public Policy Report of a Workshop at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, August 14-18, 1978 (1981) / Chapter Skim
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INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Pages 1-11
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Unlike the cost of most other types of capital goods, to say nothing of the cost of energy, raw materials, and workers, the cost of computer-based information technology has been steadily declining for more than three decades. This has been due mainly to the sharply declining cost of the computer's electronic components.
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And the third is the harmful effects that poorly conceived decisions about the technology could have on the nation's economy, even in the short term. As to the first, there seems to be little doubt that the pace of technological advance is now so rapid that many of the conventional statutory and regulatory approaches to deciding how computer-based information technology can or should be used are increasingly unreliable.
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Looking to the future, however, one foresees it becoming a major impediment to sound public decision making. Indeed, if policy makers are to be freed from the confines of today's narrow approaches to the challenges computer-based information technology is raising, one doubts that they can avoid supplementing the adversary process with other sources of knowledge and expertise.
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1* If, as some economists now urge, one broadens the industry definition to include government users and certain large businesses that could not operate without computer-based information technology
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McCarter, and William Erickson, Information Processing in the United States, a Quantitative Summary (Montvale, N.J.: AFIPS Press) , October 1977, p.
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The figures for the telecommunications industry are sharply lower, but may soon grow, since several industry giants, including AT&T, are currently bidding for a share of the rapidly expanding markets for telephone systems in developing countries. Such a sizeable balance-of-payments contribution is one of the reasons why many industry spokesmen have begun to voice concern about the way public policy decisions, or nondecisions, may constrain innovative uses of computerbased information technology, both in this country and abroad.
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Finally, Chapter V examines the U.S. government's own use of computer-based information technology for domestic program purposes, with particular stress on identifying
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One hopes, however, that even this modest effort will demonstrate why strengthening that ability is essential. Depending on the policies that govern its application, computer-based information technology will bring about changes for the better or worse; there is nothing inevitable or foreordained about its effects.
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Conscious inaction is included because, if public authorities are aware of issues and consequences and either choose not to take or are unable to take new policy actions, they are, in effect, allowing the existing structure of public rules or private policies, or both, to continue operating. Increasingly, and especially where major technologies such as computing and communications are involved, public policy on significant issues has these characteristics: (1)
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4. The conventional definition of the "information industry" includes all manufacturers and suppliers of computing equipment; all commercial data processing service bureaus; AT&T; the nation's l,590 independent telephone companies; Western Union; the "international record carriers" -- Western Union International, RCA Global Communications, ITT World Communications, TRT Telecommunications, and French Telegraph; the Communications Satellite Corporation; the Microwave Carriers -- primarily MCI Communications and Southern Pacific Communications; Telenet, Tymnet, and Graphnet -- the so-called "value-added" carriers, which lease their communications lines from others; the several domestic satellite carriers -- Western Union, RCA, American Satellite, Southern Satellite, and the fledgling Satellite Business Systems Corporation; mobile radio carriers and suppliers; retailers of acoustical couplers, computerized switchboards, and the like; cable television companies; and all local radio and television stations plus the national networks.
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10. Examples of public-policy action or inaction inhibiting innovation would include the seven-year delay that occurred in the commercial application of domestic satellites -- while industry structure was being proposed, analyzed, debated, and challenged; a similar delay in the application of mobile telephone technology at 800 MHZ -- while an analysis of spectrum utilization was being made and disputes between dispatch-type and mobile telephone-type services were being contested; the delays that have occurred in the introduction of cable television due to effective political opposition by broadcasting interests; and the attenuated controversy over government regulation of data communications, the so-called "hybrid services," discussed below, pp.
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