Date: Sun, 22 Nov 92 15:00:15 EST
From: Christopher Schmidt <cschmidt@lynx.dac.northeastern.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Information Providers Seek Monopoly
Organization: TELECOM Digest
X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 12, Issue 868, Message 7 of 8

           INFORMATION PROVIDERS SEEK MONOPOLY

"Today's fat cats, like the robber barons of old, get ready to carve
up cyberspace -- and your future."

                     by Tom Dworetzky
            Contributing Editor, Omni Magazine

[This editorial originally appeared in the August 1992 issue of {Omni
Magazine}.]

Trolleys were electric trains, clean running, as environmentally sound
(or sounder than) buses.  Years later, I find out that the
disappearance and destruction of the country's trolley systems was the
result not of free-market forces and consumer preference, but of a
callous, monopolistic deal to crush the trolleys nationwide.  To make
their deal secure, the industrialists paved over trolley rails from
coast to coast.  Now the land is carved up with highways; trolley
cars, if you can find them at all, exist only in museums.

As we head into the Information Age, we'll soon find ourselves in a
parallel situation.  Two great technologies now battle it out for the
transport of information: telephone and cable companies.  Recently,
matters came to a head when the Baby Bells started a push to change
their original deregulation mandate and offer information services.
Newspaper companies across the continent swelled with indignation.
Turns out most cable in the United States is owned by media elephants
such as Time Warner.  While busy on the one hand reporting on the evil
phone companies' attempts to crush newspapers and other information
organizations with monopolistic muscle, these media companies with
their other hand have been shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars
into a race to beat the local Bells at the information business.

In fact, 30 cable companies have reportedly obtained federal licenses
to construct wireless phone networks that will employ cable wiring and
cellular phones as an alternative to the standard phone company.

Back when the country was new and the frontier's bounty stretched
forever, rails and roads competed for profits from the transport of
grain, steel, cattle, and oil -- the fruits of the blossoming
industrial revolution.  That was, or seemed to be, good: It brought a
surge of development and wealth that fed, housed, and clothed us all.
Unfortunately, a century later, we find the frontier despoiled and
spent, plundered by the greedy and reduced to the present economic and
environmental morass.

As we enter the Information Age, let's look at the war shaping up
"between" cable/newspaper and phone giants.  Are their interests ours?
Are they really concerned about our information needs?  Or are they
just colluding to provide us with a Hobbesian choice between two
lesser evils? -- between one overpriced, moderately bad system and
another.  Just because they own the patents, do they have the power to
carve up the future between them and squeeze out any newer, fairer,
cheaper, more-useful technologies that might actually serve us all and
make for a better information landscape?  Look at your phone bill,
then ask yourself: If they all start delivering information, as in the
electronic workplace, won't the bills run hundreds of dollars a month,
and won't we have to pay them?  And won't that be a sort of hidden
tax, the price of entry to becoming a worker in the Information Age?

The resolution won't be the flurry of proposed legislation in DC to
block, free, or regulate the move of data carriers into the
information businewss.  I don't know what the answer is.  But I do
know that if you listen quietly, you can hear the metallic whisper of
knife edge on sharpening stone as today's fat cats, like the robber
barons of old, get ready to carve up cyberspace -- and your future.

                         ----------------

[Moderator's Note: The author's comments are worth thinking about. One
minor error was his reference to 'trolley tracks': Streetcars ran on
tracks, while trolleys ran on the street with regular rubber tires on
their wheels. Both methods of transportation used overhead wires to
draw their electrical current through a 'catenary', or pole hoisted in
the air above the vehicle.  PAT]