Promoting Innovation to Prevent the Internet from Becoming a Wasteland

Images of a wasteland abound in our political, economic, and cultural vocabulary. T.S. Eliot, in his famous poem, was drawing on religious representations of a land rendered barren by God's wrath. (1) Eliot was referring to a metaphorical barrenness: the spiritual and existential impoverishment of post-World War I-Europe. Wasteland as physical or spiritual barrenness has come to dominate the notion of the wasteland in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The mayor of Hiroshima, speaking on the fifty-fourth anniversary of his city's bombing, referred to the nuclear holocaust as a "scorched wasteland"; and, recently, Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, similarly referred to his nation as a "wasteland." Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton N. Minow's famous 1961 speech evokes a different kind of wasteland. (2) Speaking to a gathering of TV executives, he lamented that television, rather than serving the "public interest" with "a soul and a conscience," had become a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western badmen, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And, endlessly, commercials--many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. (3) In this gloomy vision, television is suffering from profusion rather than barrenness--and yet the net result is much the same as in the other wasteland metaphors: unfulfilled potential, wasted resources, and lack of innovation. IS THE INTERNET A WASTELAND? More than four decades have passed since Minow's speech, and in that time, we have seen the emergence of a new form of electronic communication, one that has held as much, if not more, promise than did television in Minow's America. In 1999, drawing an analogy with earlier forms of communication such as radio and television, I pointed out that the potential of the Internet was tremendous, but by no means fulfilled. I underscored that there was a distinct possibility that the Internet would disappoint those who saw it as a force for positive social transformation. (4) The intervening three years has made even clearer that we confront numerous challenges regarding access to information, and distribution of content on the Internet. Is the Internet in danger of becoming the new wasteland? The first part of this Essay explains why we should continue to be optimistic about the Internet. The second part, however, points out that the Internet is confronting several important challenges that, if left unattended, could take us down a path leading toward a new form of Minow's wasteland. The third part suggests some ways of dealing with these challenges: it proposes a framework for Internet governance that would permit innovation and the public interest to flourish. WHY THE INTERNET IS NOT A WASTELAND The Internet is the fastest-growing communications network in history. In just about a decade, it has grown from a peripheral experiment to a global resource that is central to the lives of more than 600 million users around the world. (5) In both the developing and developed worlds, it is providing access to a huge resource of information, pictures, museums, stories, and countries. It is transforming the way people take part in the political process, introducing efficiencies into the delivery of government services, and spurring productivity and economic and social development. To cite just a few numbers: Nearly 80% of American Internet users went online in 2002 to look for information on political candidates; (6) 73 million Americans searched for online health information; (7) and globally, the size of e-commerce transactions now amounts to more than $2.293 trillion, a figure that is estimated to grow by nearly 54% over the next four years. …