Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [154]
Fred Friendly has been calling for an “electronic bill of rights” for a number of years, but government has been moving in the opposite direction, with the Clinton administration, despite its apparent belief in open access, committed to letting the market make the moves with a minimum of regulation. The “public airwaves” are still auctioned off to private vendors who sell them back at exorbitant rates to the public during election campaigns—increasing the costs of democracy and the dependence of elections on money at the very moment when government has backed away from regulation. The 1984 Cable Act gives local franchisers (cities and towns) rather than the federal or state government control over cable, in effect abandoning it to market forces that have shown scant regard for public needs.4 In 1994, Senator Inouye introduced a bill into Congress directing the Federal Communications Commission to require the “reservation for public uses of capacity on telecommunications networks.” His aim was to guarantee the public some voice in development of the Information Superhighway. His bill received little press attention and expired without action at the end of the 103rd Congress. Fear of government has incapacitated the public’s only agent in diverting the new technologies into public channels. The model of Channel One, a classroom network (started by Whittle Communications and now controlled by K-III Corporation) that extorts classroom advertising time from needy schools in return for desperately wanted hardware, suggests that the public is likely to be served by the new technologies only in as far as someone can make serious money off it.5
It may be a cause of satisfaction, as Walter Wriston insists, that nowadays it is the citizen who is watching Big Brother and not the other way around. To be sure, in most post-Communist societies, as in our own market societies, Big Brother is no longer watching you; but neither is he watching those who are watching you, and even adversaries of regulation may find reason to be disturbed by that omission. If the classical liberal question used to be who will police the police, the pertinent liberal question in today’s McWorld ought to be who will watch those who are watching us? Who will prevent the media from controlling their clients and consumers? Who will act in lieu of a government that has demurred from representing the public’s interests?
There would perhaps be less cause for concern if technology and telecommunication markets were truly diversified and competitive. But as we have seen, the conglomeration of companies focused on programming, information, communication, and entertainment suggests that government’s erstwhile big brother has been dwarfed today by Ma Bell and her overgrown babies, who are currently buying up the cable market and trying to purchase entertainment and software production companies as fast as they can. Their aim is to stay competitive with infotainment companies like Time Warner. Thus US West bought a significant minority interest (along with Toshiba and C. Itoh) in Warner Brothers film studio and Home Box Office only to have Time Warner acquire Cablevision ($2.2 billion) and Houston Industries ($2.3 billion) in 1995, and thereby regain control. The harder the American government tries to stay out of the development of a free market information highway, the harder corporate multinationals are trying to get in; and if they cannot effect a total takeover of the digital thoroughfare, they aspire at least to gain control of its gateways and tollbooths.
Democrats should not be the Luddites Jihad’s anxious tribal warriors have become; they cannot afford to make technology and modernity enemies of self-determination and liberty. Technology