The information resources policy handbook : research for the Information Age

641 Pages·1999·200.579 MB·English

by  Benjamin M Compaine, William H Read

The Information Resources Policy Handbook
Copyrighted Material
edited by
Benjamin M. Compaine
William H. Read
The Information Resources Policy Handbook
Research for the Information Age
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
Copyrighted Material
© 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec-
tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage
and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Times New Roman by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Information resources policy handbook : research for the
information age I edited by Benjamin M. Compaine, William H. Read.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-03264-3 (he : alk. paper)
I. Information resource management-Handbooks, manuals, etc.
I. Compaine, Benjamin M. II. Read, William H.
T58.64.15335 1999
658.4'038-dc21 98-48229
CIP
Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 17, 20, and 21 reprinted with permission ofthe
Program on Information Resources Policy, Harvard University. ©The President and
Fellows of Harvard College in years as follows: chapter 1 (1994), chapter 2 (1995),
chapter 3 (1985), chapter 5 ( 1985), chapter 6 (1994 ), chapter 7 (1989), chapter 8 (1989),
chapter 10 (1989), chapter 12 (1986), chapter 13 (1998), chapter 14 (1985), chapter 17
(1998), chapter 20 (1996), chapter 21 (1996).
Introduction reprinted with permission of Science 209 (July 4, 1980). © 1980 American
Association for the Advancement of Science.
Chapter 9 reprinted with permission of Harvard Business Review (May-June 1979)
© 1979 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Chapter 16 is an excerpt from lthiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom, Cambridge,
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Reprinted Mass: Harvard University
Press, reprinted with permission. © 1983, The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Chapter 21 is an excerpt from chapter I, W. Russell Neuman, Lee McKnight, and
Richard J. Solomon, The Gordian Knot (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press). Reprinted
with permission. © 1997 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Copyrighted Material
This book is dedicated to Anthony G. Oettinger, who founded the Program on
Information Resources Policy, which for a quarter of a century has provided
insightful, competent, and impartial research on controversial matters of
continuing relevance about the evolution of the age of information.
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Contents
Foreword: Into the Age of Information xi
William 0. Baker
Preface xvii
Benjamin M. Compaine and William H. Read
Introduction: Information Resources: Knowledge and Power in the
21st Century xxiii
Anthony G. Oettinger
I Ageless Issues 1
Evergreen: 1 Telling Ripe from Hype in Multimedia: The Ecstasy and the
Agony 3
Anthony G. Oettinger
2 Will Computer Communication End Geography? 29
Vincent Mosco
II New Age Technology 75
Evergreen: 3 A Convergence of Form and Function: Compunications
Technologies 77
Material
Anrh(;pp}yreitg,Qted
viii Contents
4 Understanding Computers and Communications 85
Robert W Lucky
5 Understanding Digital 111
Anthony G. Oettinger
6 Standards: The Rough Road to the Common Byte 195
Martin C. Libicki
Ill Information as a Resource 237
Evergreen: 7 Building Blocks and Bursting Bundles 239
Anthony G. Oettinger
8 Publishing as a Creature of Technology 289
Jerome S. Rubin and Janet Wikler
9 Communications-For Better or for Worse 303
Daniel Bell
IV The Information Business 321
Evergreen: 10 Charting Change: The Harvard Information Business
Map 323
Anthony G. Oettinger and John F McLaughlin, with Anne E. Birinyi
11 Size, Growth, and Trends of the Information Industries, 1987-1996 347
Derrick C. Huang
12 Managing Information: Back to Basics 363
Benjamin M. Compaine and John F McLaughlin
13 Knowledge as a Strategic Business Resource 3 79
William H. Read
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ix Contents
14 New Competition and New Media 405
Benjamin M. Compaine
V Information Policy 421
Evergreen: 15 Information and Communications Policy Research-More
Important, More Neglected 423
Eli M. Noam
16 Policies for Freedom 431
!thief de Sola Pool
17 Regulating Communications in the 21st Century: New Common
Ground 453
Patricia Hirl Longstaff
18 FCC Reform: Does Governing Require a New Standard? 491
William H. Read and Ronald Alan Weiner
19 Cybercommunities and Cybercommerce: Can We Learn to Cope? 531
Anne Wells Branscomb
20 Cyberrules: Problems and Prospects for On-Line Commerce 549
Debora Spar
21 Political Gridlock on the Information Highway 575
W Russell Neuman, Lee McKnight, and Richard J. Solomon
22 Information Resources in the 21st Century 601
Benjamin M. Compaine and William H. Read
About the Editors and Authors 613
Index 617
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Foreword: Into the Age of Information
An Age of Information has its modem base in the Age of Science and Tech-
nology that has characterized the twentieth century. Previously, technology and
invention came along as human supplements for human activities in moving and
exercising: the wheel and its mechanization for locomotion; energy conversion
such as the steam engine and distributed electricity, dynamos, and motors. But
the analogs in communication-the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone
-were complements to other activities in the thinking and doings of people.
Similarly, these special qualities of human action are reflected in the Babbage
machines, the electrical relays of Stibitz, the ENIAC of Eckert and Mauchly,
and von Neumann's conceptions.
Professor Anthony Oettinger of Harvard University was among the very
few who recognized that major parts of the surging science and technology
of the early twentieth century would converge with inventive design and con-
ceptual uses of knowledge. This was happening especially in the cataclysmic
struggles of the mid-century leading to the structuring of knowledge to be called
"information."
Thus, as systems of telecommunications and logic machines coevolved, Dr.
Oettinger saw that societies,-economies, and industries, as well as governments,
were likely to seek deeper understanding and implementation of how informa-
tion could be organized and processed. A major advance was Claude Shannon's
theorems and concepts that the elements of logic (that is, a binary state of yes-
or-no, phis or minus, north or south) were central to communications tech-
niques. Another step in comprehending that telephone switching systems could
have universal meanings for the coding of information were the principles of
Nyquist and his associates (somewhat like the dots and dashes with which
electric telegraphy functioned). As television and, to a lesser extent, enhanced
telephony, magnified its requirements, telecommunications companies sought
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xii Foreword
higher and higher frequencies for broader bandwidths in their networks. We
worked in our laboratories with a growing electronics technology but suffered
from the inadequate capacities and reliability of a technology dominated by de
Forest's and Arnold's vacuum tubes.
Ultimately came the discovery of the transistor and a vast range of its deriv-
atives. We were aided by the dramatic advance in materials for all sorts of
mechanical and electrical systems, including rocketry and satellites, as well as
the spread of quantum theoretic insight into crystals and condensed matter.
This was at the same time that Shannon's insights into information content and
the structure of messages and signaling were illuminating cryptography and
cryptanalysis and related issues crucial to victory in World War II. Their value
was even more decisive in the dangerous confrontation with the nuclear threats
of the Cold War.
Dr. Oettinger's keen interest in creativity and novelty had, in due course,
associated him with Professor Howard Aiken's work on computers for crypt-
analysis for the National Security Agency. And his connoisseur's concern
with how the telecommunications system could serve a global video and uni-
versal telephonic economy stirred his interest in solid-state circuitry. Soon Dr.
Oettinger saw that the transistor and the solid-state diode would enable digital
circuitry responsive to Shannon's units.
Dr. Oettinger also early exhibited a keen instinct for how commercial uses
could grow if information was recognized as a supplement to labor and per-
sonal skills, or a complement to human capabilities. He thus foresaw the reality
of the expectations reported to the Engineer's Joint Council on the "Nation's
Engineering Research Needs." 1 That report said that the traditional role of the
engineer and technologists, as well as most other sorts of specialists (such as
physicians, journalists, brokers, and bankers), would be recast in their services
to society. That report stated:
This recasting will be discussed as taking primarily the form of vastly reducing the
routine actions of handling and applying information for designs, maintenance, and
operation (whether of manufactures, of vehicles or of people). There is accordingly the
possibility of restoring large elements of personal independence and ingenuity to the
specialized manpower of the nation, a quality which has been progressively reduced in
the first half of this century by the necessary proliferation of rigid and standard practices
which accompany the great growth of industrial and public systems.
Dr. Oettinger quantified how much of this reformation in human function
could occur. Within a decade he had established the Harvard Program on
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xiii Foreword
Information Resources Policy. This originated and remains the most sapient
source of how the enduring creativity of information science and engineering
have interacted with people in the second half of the twentieth century.
Accordingly, it is striking that Dr. Oettinger recognized that, in the Age of
Information, science and technology would become concurrent rather than
leading-edge elements of commercial, governmental, and social applications.
This is in contrast to what is now happening in the life sciences, and has
traditionally occurred in energy and vehicular systems. What is now being
called the cybereconomy is nevertheless not even half of the proportion of
the gross domestic product represented by the health care industry. Specifically,
by 1998 "information" products were about $900 billion or 8 percent of the
gross domestic product. This was roughly 50 percent higher than in 1992 and
employed about five million Americans. Much of this growth has been con-
centrated in software, itself a $100 billion industry, forecast to employ 3. 5 million
in the United States by 2005, or about 3 percent of the total work force. Already,
and somewhat astonishingly to many of us, the population of the United States
is now spending more on computers than on TV sets (although the number of
TV sets remains far greater).
The Harvard program recognized these trends long before they became
obvious. Insights such as Dr. Oettinger's can be seen in the factors that permit
the multitrillion dollar operations of the world's currency markets that is now a
routine exercise. Oettinger identified forces and trends very early that are con-
sistent with subsequent data, such as the data documenting that banks that
processed about 265 checks an hour in 1971, by 1986 processed over I 000 such
units with the benefits of information technology. This rate pales further with
today's digital funds transactions.
This little foray into economic impacts could be extended into many other
realms beyond the entertainment and communications of daily life. Thus, even
though, in 1998, bytes per day of telephone traffic in the United States was
about 30 times that of Internet traffic and will double in a fairly short time,
Internet traffic was expected to triple annually through 2002 or 2003. These
volume gains have been accompanied by striking innovations that confirm the
seeming outsized predictions of only a few years ago. Thus, the prediction of
usage in a report at the I OOth anniversary of the Ericsson Company in Stock-
holm in 1976, while extreme at the time, has now largely been achieved and
bypassed by ever-more effective capabilities. 2
Indeed, while these particular services are largely telecommunications-based,
compilations such as The Second Information Society Index (lSI) have surveyed
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