The government describes the Accord as the product of two years of discussions. But it was only in the last few months of that time, when community groups were allowed to participate, that the discussion came to the community's use of these new telecommunications facilities. Three Key Issues Issues regarding the Electronic Highway are very important, but they are not my focus here. Instead, I will focus on the Information Highway, in terms of public access and public infrastructure. The issue here arises from the difference between treating government information as a public service and treating it as a corporate asset.
Computerization greatly facilitates the commoditization of information.
This trend is exacerbated by the recent tendency of almost all Western governments to explore cost-recovery and entrepreneurial activity in an effort to reduce unsustainable deficits and debt loads. There are some major problems with that logic. First, as a practical matter, governments typically overestimate the actual profit that can be made by selling their information. They underestimate the cost of doing business, by not counting their overhead and information collection costs. And they overestimate the government's net revenue by including sales to other government bodies.