Jeff Jarvis has posted the lastest in his Issues2004 series. This time out his topic is communications. Jeff’s position in a nutshell: government should get the hell out of the way.
While I have a great deal of sympathy with this point of view, I believe that when you examine the historic record it’s clear that the role of government in communications is more complex than that. The federal government has played several distinct roles in communications in the last century or so including regulation (as in Jeff’s favorite whipping boy, the FCC), providing subsidies for the development of new media (particularly the Internet), and enforcing its intellectual property laws. Since Jeff has dealt with the regulation aspect of the role of the federal government so frequently in his blog, I want to concentrate on the role of the federal government in subsidizing research and intellectual property.
The Internet was created with subsidies from the federal government. It was originally a project of the Defense Advance Research Projects Administration and was referred to as the DARPA-net. The Internet is an example of government research at its best. In my opinion government is just fair at doing basic research and actually quite good at large-scale engineering projects. These are projects that have a very specific scope and objective. Putting astronauts on the moon was such an engineering project. The beneficial effects of that project which include both the PC revolution and cell phones will have to wait for another post.
The engineering problem that DARPA was attempting to solve was how do you create a network of computers that is durable enough to stand up to nuclear attack? What they came up with was the set of protocols and standards that make up the nuts-and-bolts of the Internet.
What most people think of as the Internet and cognoscenti refer to as the World Wide Web (which was built on top of the Internet protocols) was also created by government. Tim Berners-Lee and his collaborators at CERN (the Center for European Nuclear Research) developed the protocols that led to the modern Internet while working at a government-funded research institution.
The Internet’s higher-speed more secure successor is waiting in the wings: Internet II. And it’s government-funded, too.
The secret of the success of the Internet lies in two factors: standards and free availablility. These are both concepts commonplace in government but rare outside of government until rather recently. The Open Source Software movement, a movement of standards and free availability, grew up with the inspiration and in the context of the Internet. A totally proprietary Internet is simply not conceivable. Believe me, it was tried. Such efforts never achieved the adoption level of the freely available standards-based Internet.
What’s the greatest threat to the Internet? It’s neither Internet taxes or content regulation i.e. government interference. From Tim Berners-Lee:
I’ll give you three things that we always have to deal with. One is the tension over patents and proprietary standards. We’re trying to get the standards adopted despite the fact that big companies are doing their own thing.
Another big problem is the question of patents and royalties. We’ve made some huge strides, but it’s still something that may loom over us going forward. It’s encouraging that a lot of large companies are realizing that they have to allow royalty-free use of patents to take the industry forward.
The biggest threat to the Internet is government’s role in intellectual property.
See how cleverly I made that transition?
The very notion of intellectual property is a creature of the government. There is no such thing as a natural right to intellectual property which in nature is intrinsically non-exclusionary. The right to intellectual property is a legal right not a natural right.
A final word on communications and government regulation. Why do we have cellphones, voice mail, faxes, and high-speed modems? They’re all direct consequences of the breaking up of the Bell System monopoly. Leaving aside for the moment government’s role in creating that system, it’s just not conceivable that that monopoly would have disappeared without government intervention. And the Bell System had regulations against connecting non-authorized equipment to the telephone system. In practice that meant the Bell System (or suppliers approved by the Bell System) had to supply anything that connected in any way to the phone systsem. That made technologies like faxes and high-speed modems hopelessly expensive for common acceptance.
If you examine the foregoing discussion, it should be clear to you that government regulation, subsidies, and intellectual property are inter-related. There’s a delicate balance that’s appropriate among them. While it may seem intellectually appealing to eliminate all government involvement here in the real world a) that’s not going to happen and b) we would all be impoverished if it did. So we’re stuck with the delicate balance and the political process.
So after all the long-winded exposition here are my suggestions. I’m not a First Amendment crank like Jeff. I don’t have any problem with some content regulation on my property. And the airwaves and a lot of the resources used by even cable media are public property. I think that there’s a beneficial role for government in trust-busting. I think that government-funded projects should be restricted to large-scale engineering projects with well-defined scopes and objectives. If you think that I don’t think much of NIH grants, you’d be right. And I think the bar should be raised much higher for securing software and business process patents.
