From: cschmidt@lynx.dac.northeastern.edu (Christopher Schmidt)
Subject: Information Providers Seek Monopolies 
Reply-To: cschmidt@lynx.dac.northeastern.edu (Christopher Schmidt)
Organization: Northeastern University, Boston, MA. 02115, USA
Distribution: world 
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 11:57:35 GMT

          INFORMATION PROVIDERS SEEK MONOPOLIES

            "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.
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