{back from break--Issues At Hand logo, dissolve to Richard}

{RICHARD. Behind him, worldmap of information pathways glowing, pulsing, and globe turning--IH2-18/I2}

The creation of a unified communication web of digital information, which is the backbone of the Information Agenda, did more than just create a national community. It also created a unified force in the international arena.

At first, other nations were allowed to tie into the system without charge, but as the services got more intricate, and the value of those services--and the information being gathered--became apparent to all involved, the Williams Administration, with the support of Congress, created the International Trade Agency to monitor and regulate the international information lines.

The idea was first put forth during the February Flurry, and kept floating to the surface through many discussions, press conferences, and speeches. The International Trade Agency wasn't established until January of 1994. Williams clarified some of the expectations and justifications for the sale of information at a press conference in November of 1993.

{cut to:}

One place I think we could do well is to charge our information partners differential rates. We have most- to least-favored-nation statuses now for foreign trade in materials, based on many aspects of the other nations' governmental policies. Support of human rights, support for democratic institutions, support for freedom and human dignity, these are the criteria we use for determining such status. As a consequence, they get lower tariffs, more advantageous capital requirements, and the like. Such policies have visibly changed other nations' policies in the past, and they are, in principle as well as practice, the sort of pressure that we can both be proud of and become experts at.

Let me repeat for the millionth time that the US is the single biggest market in the world. We are the single biggest economy in the world. Our economic clout is remarkable, which is why so there was so much worry the last few years about the lurching American economy. And by using that strength as something of a carrot--or perhaps just a stick--then we can perhaps reinforce in other countries what we hold to be true in our own.

Those most-favored-nation statuses may need to be modified, however, in our international information trade.

To some extent, the rules of the free market mean that we should charge what the market will bear, depending upon the nation wanting the data. That would mean that for those for whom information is a commodity, the rate would be higher than for those who have hardly any need for the information.

The European Community would be expected to pay a higher rate than, say, Nigeria. What turns the economics a little topsy-turvy is that in all truth, Nigeria needs the information available on our web more than the EC does--the EPA's data, for example, might be something of a revelation for a bureaucrat in Nigeria, while it would likely only buttress an existing opinion to the bureaucrat of the EC.

Humane international behavior should result, however, in low fees for the satellite links, and the online time, the processing time, and the phone connections. How those two often contradictory policies are to be resolved, I don't know as yet.

We are just beginning, really, to address the complex issues of foreign information exchange. Information hasn't been a commodity long enough for us to have a vocabulary for describing, or a unit for measuring, information. Value is a subjective term, yet I am willing to state that the US's information base is more valuable than any other's simply because it is the biggest of the technically advanced societies in the world. We are the single biggest market in the international scene. We are the most factually drenched society in the world.

Since all that is true, we may need to establish baselines of what we think we're worth, and then charge it.

We'll hear complaints, but that's expectable.

Yet our policy must stem from our humanitarian principles. We cannot make policy merely on how much our government and people might profit by selling or trading information in a free information market. Instead, we must sell our market, provide access to our information, and use our culture as a form of humanitarian foreign policy.

Romania's fees must be lower than Germany's. Rwanda's must be lower than Australia's.

It's only reasonable. Unless we carefully choose how we use our public information information base, then we will be doing the same thing internationally that we are bending over backward not to do here--excluding the already disadvantaged from participation in contemporary society.

And that we will not do, for it is neither fair nor worthy of the American people. Just as we resolved not to create a two-tiered society of information-rich and information-poor, so must be resolve not to propagate that split in the international arena.

Sam Donaldson:

Mr. President, that sounds an awful lot like a campaign speech. I thought you'd already been elected....

{laughter}

Williams:

{grinning}

But there I go again. Don't you guys long for the good old days of presidents speaking in sound bites?

{laughter from press corps}

{cut to:}

That was in November of 1993. Since then, much of that vision has come to pass. And more, as Stevie Wibb explores.

{cut to:}

{caption:}

Not only has the international trade grown, Richard, but it has practically taken on a life of its own. Information futures are sold in Chicago, and the analysis of those futures has become a churning business. As much alchemy as science, these consultants mix and match data base analyzers, expert systems, and their own gut feel.

{cut to:}

My job is to attend to the qualitative analysis of the international information trade. That's quite a mouthful, I know, but it's the closest thing I've found to a one-sentence description.

It's a new field with a relatively old tradition, revolving as it does around philosophy, epistomology, heuristics... all grounded in pragmatics, of course.

The information trade is a tailorable commodity--I mean to say, particular aspects of the country's information generation can be priced depending upon their demand. Since the information trade is tailorable, there has to be measuring tools for the vast stream of information.

What Beadle & Bromley Associates does, and what a number of companies are doing, is developing qualitative analysis tools, that give counts on frequency of what we call "action words"--those things that define market niches, or imply likelihoods of opinion, or whatever--and by analyzing the action words, do taste demographics internationally based on the information being bought on the market.

It's ironic that we can do that sort of analysis on the international market, but we can't do the same thing at home. There are differences, I suppose, since we're measuring the data requests of entire communities the world over instead of just watching an individual. Nontheless the job involves correlating variables, interpreting patterns.

But the software, to sample the datastream appropriately, to do the analysis at high speeds, the software is much more intricate.

I don't do the analysis, really, but I guide the analysis, which is important.

{dissolve cut, return to same}

Of course I'm amazed that even I'm doing this job. I wouldn't have believed, even four years ago, that my job would exist. Or that any job I would personally be doing would influence millions, if not billions, of dollars. The trade in information futures has only been around since what, September of '94? Two months after the Information Tariff was imposed. Thousands of jobs are involved in that enterprise, if not hundreds of thousands tangentially.

{laughs}

{cut to:}

{caption:}

{I love this pair-up, and the way the last man leads right into this one}

The most interesting aspect of the litigation is that most of the lawsuits aren't challenging the existence of the tarriff, they're just objecting to the tarriff being imposed on them.

Take Beatrice Foods' suit. Their primary argument was that foodstuffs were humanitarian tools, and that their information should not be taxed. Interestingly, the did not argue that information tarriffs weren't acceptable, or were unconstitutional.

The primary information tax was on outside users of the Window system. Since every government, and most businesses, wanted the information that the Window could provide, the business of selling access to the system to foreigners had to become a government enterprise. It still a ticklish issue, but the question keeps coming back: what else are you going to do? The information, and the Window web, and the software that accesses it all, nearly all belong to the government. Who else would sell it?

There are many ways to get information, and of course there's lots of cheating. And the government will prosecute.

Suspected individual cheaters on information taxes have every transaction inspected. But why cheat, when the international costs are so low--a dollar an hour for connect time, and a penny per ten K of downloaded information per line.

The ticklish part of the law has as much to do with definitions as anything else. Because strictly humanitarian information--nutrition, health, basic literacy tools, and the like--are free, everyone wants their information to be classified as a humanitarian tool.

{cut to:}

Many things allowed the information trade to be as successful as it is. The importance of a unified public web, in which everybody has the opportunity to take part in the business of the society, cannot be overstated. If only the corporations, the businesses, and the wealthy had been the users of the web, then the long-term advantages to American manufacturing and high-tech firms would have been significantly smaller.

{cut to:}

{caption:}

{McNally here hits a lot of points, some of which apply to the Information Trade context, but mostly his overview fits in to this section.}

Quite truthfully, I didn't think he'd be able to get it done. What are there, a hundred million homes? Not to mention offices, businesses, everything. How can you expect to successfully manufacture, distribute, and set up a hundred million homes? Well, the answer is, you don't. The Agenda didn't; the US government didn't, at least not all by itself.

What did make it a success was that businesses and individuals could also buy into it, quite literally. There was no real difference in the cost of having the service; but the actual machinery could indeed make a difference, in status if not speed.

The thing that really made it happen wasn't what most people say, though. Sure, it was good ol' American ingenuity, and it was a solid technical base, and it was a good satellite and fiberoptic spine to run it on--it was all those things too. But most of the what Williams did to make it happen was to slip into the legislation--after it had been debated for that furious February week, mind you--a distinctly weighted scale of preference for the first five million government-supplied nodes.

It may have been one of the first times a President consciously favored the poor in order to favor the nation.

He made sure that the majority of the federally-supported systems would initially go to the low-income homes that couldn't pay for a system themselves. That meant that the middle and higher-income households felt even more compelled to get a computer system of their own, or to upgrade their existing system. So those people ended up getting much fancier systems, generally speaking, than the standard issue.

Because High Definition TV was the graphic standard being set by the federally-supported systems--as well as the government-office systems--that meant that full-wall monitors were possible, and very much desired, even if up till that point they were very expensive. By establishing the standard, the Information Agenda brought the force of the federal buying power to bear on the market, making the highest tech have a huge market, making the price go down.

TV-computer duos were possible. Remember, the HDTV international standard was still being haggled over in 1993.

Computer screens and televisions had almost always been different units. But suddenly the standard was set, and so both the media industry, the telecommunications industry, and the computer industry all could work toward the same goal.

At that time, the 586 chips were being pushed, with the 786 rumored to be in R&D, with a billion connections on a chip. The February Flurry suddenly changed the scope of possibilities for all our high-tech firms, because their products were legally advantaged--the government was expected to bid the jobs out with American firms in mind.

That meant that all the American high-tech manufacturers makers had a heyday on both the top and bottom of the markets. The economy was given a real shot in the arm by this--there was a lot of capital flying about. Many squawked that too much of it was going to Japan, and for the first six months it seemed that way, until the American companies could establish the dominance they have since held by having such a huge economy-of-scale advantage.

Then the HDTV dominance that we'd established began to pay off, and the balance of payments--along with the information-trade surpluses--began to be felt. The entreprenurial spirit of small business, as well as big business, was able to rise again.

The point is that Williams made a coup that was both politically and economically shrewd, especially in the long run. He quite literally snuck the provision in on the draft that was being sent around the Hill. It was an extreme risk, under certain circumstances, but during that period, after his surprising win, and with the ferment of the crumbling Presidency and economy acting like fertilizer for his Agenda, during that period it seemed he couldn't lose.

The Republicans were battling their big-money image of the party whose policies and adherents had caused the economic chaos we were in. They chose not to complain about the economic-need weighting, and the Democrats didn't want to complain either, of course, and so it was included without even a squawk.

Small shrewdnesses such as these assured Williams' Agenda of long-term success, in economic terms, because he helped business from both directions; in political terms, because that economic benefit systme appealed to both the Democrats and the Republicans, and in human terms, because he was able to sidestep the "two cultures" problem, of the information-rich and information-poor seeming mutually exclusive.

If that had been allowed to continue, we would have had either race riots or a truly permanent underclass.

{cut to:}

Though Williams' support of the "next wave" of technology was important, the Window and the Information Highway both had to be "backwardly compatible" with most existing machines. The two main PC standards--the Mac and the DOS operating systems--could be intertwined with Unix and other systems; that interconnection paradigm had been established in 1992. But there were existing telecommunication systems, online systems, databases, and inter-organization protocols that needed to be addressed. Though not immediately bug-free, the system by mid-1994 had become nearly universal, in that the Highway could work on virtually any platform, and it carried access lines to nearly every existing private online system.

{cut to:}

{caption:}

{Rosen appears elsewhere, because he is good. Doesn't hurt that he's well-spoken, handsome in a James Garner sort of way, and forthright}

Things really began to heat up legally when the Windows system began accepting links to other systems. Prior to June of '94 the Window had only been for providing access to government information and government offices, and the posting of messages to others--which of course was necessary for the educonomy system.

But in June of '94, the government allowed Prodigy, GEnie, CompuServ, BIX, BITNET, INTERNET, and several other online systems to be accessed via the Window net, allowing cheaper access--lower long-distance fees--and faster throughput--as well as a cohesive interface.

This happened with the blessings of the telecommunications companies, I might add; they were looking for all the government grace they could find. What those online systems didn't seem to realize, however, was the precedent that that small modification set, since it meant that any new information system could legally be accessed via the Window.

That meant that Prodigy, GEnie, CompuServ--the for-profit online systems--were destined to be limited predominantly to the services they had contractual obligations with. New services could define themselves as an information system, or could form a cooperative system, and then be listed as a line--a road in the Highway. The for-profits had to hustle to remain profitable, usually by becoming publishers in a new sort of way, using the trust they had developed in their previous subscribers.

But most of the new forms of journalism also used the new form of communication--the Window--as their main dissemination medium.

The personality magazines? None of them are on the for-profit onlines. The hyperarts are all on the Window. The song-alongs--all on the Window. The specialty educations are all on the Window.

The for-profit onlines I mentioned resisted, of course, but the precedent had been set and the court system was ill-disposed to make a ruling that guaranteed monopolies, or that forced a distinction between art and commerce, or that arbitrarily established a limit on what information a government could disseminate, or could facilitate disseminating.

One of the federal judges who heard the case compared the Window web's legal footing to the interstate highway system's legal base, an analogy that Williams began in his February Flurry addresses, and that holds great weight legally, since precedents had been well established for the transportation system.

The judge stated simply that the federal government did not profit from the commercial use of the roads, yet the existence of the roads meant that profit was possible. The web was considered no more than a map that allowed the user to connect to anyone on the map. Consequently, the highway analogy of the information web became almost a de facto precedent in its own right.

{time cut; dissolve to later:}

I don't think anyone could reverse the Information Agenda.

Even if Williams is defeated in November, I think that whoever wins will simply have to carry on with what Williams started, one way or another. You can't unlink the nation any more than you can unlink the world.

Some of the opposition voices have suggested that there should be changes in the billing system, both international and domestic, to raise more revenue so as to decrease the damage taxes elsewhere. Others say there should at least be a sharp increase in the base fee for Window service, since it's so low.

Yet polls indicate clearly (and with demographically enriched data--this was done with a hypersurvey) that there would be strong opposition to that. That opinion stretches from upper to middle to lower economic strata--there is general agreement that to raise rates would defy the principles of open and equal access to information. The poor would suffer unduly.

Some candidates have suggested that we should have bigger price differentials between the optional services--that is, that HDTV transmissions be much more expensive than standard transmission in the VGA form, or that modem service be drastically cheaper than wired-in service. That has some support across the economic strata, but there is big money preventing implementation of a progressive fee structure.

Again, it comes down to priorities. It is in essence the same old question of who to tax.

The economy on the microscale is thriving. It's true that many multinational corporations have been drastically disrupted, but economic change always distrupts the status quo. Fewer people are starving now. Far more people can read. There are fewer homeless. And I don't know exactly how you measure it, but more people are involved, it seems to me.

I'm answering a bit more than the question you asked about the permanence of the Information Agenda, so let me try to get back on track. Beyond the squawks and quibbles about how the system might work better, there are no fundamental restructurings that I've run across that need to be made, or that are seriously proposed. Most of the suggestions are merely complaints.

The reverberations of February Flurry are still with us, and even three years later, we're still trying to sort out all the ramifications. So until we get all those figured out, I suspect the Agenda is a relatively permanent fixture on the American scene.

But beyond that, it's unlikely that substantive regression could occur. You can't undo the educonomy, certainly, because it's working for people, and there's such a lot of interest in it. So many people are connecting up, and now that this interactive Window processing is possible, we're looking at a phenomenally communicative society where we can interact online in "real time."

We're a one or two breakthroughs away from having the Window operate as a picturephone. Voice recognition is becoming financially as well as technologically feasible.

And that increased level of communication is helping business at fundamental levels.

In truth, the GNP, especially when sale of information is factored in, is growing at a staggering rate. We have so many debts to pay off from the last twenty years that it doesn't seem like we're thriving as well as we are. I mean, really, we're paying almost a third of our governmental income to old federal debt. Imagine where we'd be if we weren't paying off the S&L, banking, and insurance bailouts, not to mention the military intervention debts, and paying off the huge ecological debt?

Stand back! We'd be exploding. And the Window, the Information Highway, and the educonomy are part and parcel of this boom.

And to think of pulling that back? I can just imagine the response if we were to go back to the old information access systems for government research data. Lawsuits, public outcries, and the rest. You can't turn back. As Avital Ronell said, "there is no `off' switch for technology."

Look, issues of fairness of information access have been coming up in courtrooms everywhere--take the Keynight case down in Missouri, for example. What do you call an old boy network but an information system? That's the case Keynight made. Privy information can become a classist issue, and so in that sense it's legally hot. And there's a lot of money behind keeping certain public documents private.

People realize that, and are wary of curtailing access without undeniably valid reasons. Privy information almost becomes a "prior restraint" issue in freedom-of-press terms.

Williams' open-access policy is now a freedom people expect. They wouldn't put up with a curtailment of the basic "rights" of cheap communication and information access.

What we have here is a cultural tiger that Williams let out of its cage, and we're just riding it, holding on for dear life. Any successor to Williams might be able to guide the tiger in a slightly different direction, but he or she is not going to be able to stop it.

{another time cut; dissolve to later:}

One of the keys to the success of the Windows enterprise was that it gave to the US the final, convincing argument for our High Definition TV standard to be the international standard. I know it sounds sort of ridiculous that such a seemingly small thing is key, but it is, in truth, reasonable.

So much big information money was tied in to HDTV;

Japan had billions invested in their developing standard, the European Community another several billions. But when the US, the largest market in the world, created the biggest market in the world for High Definition TV products, we did two things: we defined the standard, and we gave our technology sciences and industry a jumpstart into leadership internationally.

As I said, billions were involved on all sides, and there were some hard feelings over our heavy-handed domination of that subsection of the economy. But when that first anger was over, they realized that what Williams had also done was transform not just the HDTV world, but the US and the world economy in a way that would make most of those companies more money.

By changing the US's lowest-common-denominator intelligent household device from the handheld calculator to the interactive computer, Williams raised the technological level of the world. Which meant that all those companies would likely benefit from such a world change.

Without even mentioning the societal advantages to such an enriched information base, the economic base was galvanized in much the same way that a major war does. It prodded the economy back into directed activity. Suddenly the future had a shape, and a lot of big bucks got activated as a result.

{cut to:}

Nationally and internationally, many people agree that the Information Agenda has retooled the engine of the economy for the better. But the economy isn't the only part of America that matters. Cultural, societal, and interpersonal pressures have also been applied by these changes. We talk with working people nationwide, after this.

{ad break--120 seconds}

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