EFFector Online December 17, 1992

 ########## ########## ########## |

########## ########## ########## |     MEGATRENDS OR MEGAMISTAKES?

####       ####       ####       |        What Ever Happened to 

########   ########   ########   |      the Information Society

########   ########   ########   |              (Part 1)

####       ####       ####       |

########## ####       ####       |EFF EXPLAINS ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGES

########## ####       ####       |

=====================================================================

EFFector Online           December 17, 1992               Issue  4.01

           A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

                            ISSN 1062-9424

=====================================================================

                  MEGATRENDS OR MEGAMISTAKES?

        What Ever Happened to the Information Society?

                      (Part 1 of 2 Parts)

              by Tom Forester, Senior Lecturer,

         School of Computing & Information Technology,

             Griffith University, Queensland, Australia

What ever happened to the Information Society?  Where is the

Information Age? What, indeed, happened to the "workerless" factory,

the "paperless" office and the "cashless" society?  Why aren't we all

living in the "electronic cottage," playing our part in the push-

button "teledemocracy" - or simply relaxing in the "leisure society,"

while machines exhibiting "artificial intelligence" do all the work?

Remember when the microchip first appeared on the scene in the late

1970s and we were told that social transformation was inevitable? 

Remember the Siemens report, which allegedly predicted that 40 per

cent of office jobs would soon be sacrificed to the "job destroyer"? 

And the plan by one Dutch political party for a new tax on

automation?  Remember, indeed, the US Senate committee report which

earnestly discussed the social implications of a 22 hour work week by

1985 and retirement at age 38?  

Recall, too, how we have been regularly assaulted with trendy buzz-

words and ugly acronyms by market researchers and computer vendors

over recent years, promising us that the videodisc, the video

telephone, electronic mail, teleconferencing, videotex, desktop

publishing, multimedia, ISDN, EDI, OSI, MIS, EIS, EFT-POS, RISC,

CASE, MAP, JIT, CIM, CD-ROM, DAT and HDTV would be the next "hot"

product and/or the wave of the future and/or actually deliver the

long-awaited productivity pay-off from the huge expenditure on

information technology (IT)?  

The truth is that society has not changed very much.  The microchip

has had much less social impact than almost everyone predicted. All

the talk about "future shocks", "third waves", "megatrends" and

"post-industrial" societies must now be taken with a large pinch of

salt. Life goes on for the vast majority of people in much the same

old way.  Computers have infiltrated many areas of our social life,

but they have not transformed it.  Computers have proved to be useful

tools - no more, no less.  None of the more extreme predictions about

the impact of computers on society have turned out to be correct. 

Neither Utopia nor Dystopia has arrived on Earth as a result of

computerization.  

In this address, I will first compare some of the intended

consequences of the IT revolution predicted by the pundits with what

has actually happened in important areas of society - especially in

the workplace and at home. After this review, I will look at some

tentative explanations of why so many technology forecasters seem to

have got things hopelessly wrong.  I will then review some of the

unintended consequences of the IT revolution, which weren't predicted

by the pundits. These include: the new social problems of unreliable

software, computer crime, software theft, hacking, the creation of

viruses and the invasion of privacy;  and some psychological problems

associated with computer-based communication technologies - who could

have foreseen, for instance, that today we would be discussing why

some executives have become "communicaholic" mobile phone users,

"spreadsheet junkies", "electronic mail addicts" and "fax potatoes"? 

I will conclude with some brief comments about the relationship

between humans and technology, arguing that we need to reassert the

primacy of human values.  

                    INTENDED CONSEQUENCES 

THE WORKPLACE IN THE "LEISURE" SOCIETY  

Since so many of the early predictions about the social impact of IT

envisaged dramatic reductions in the quantity of paid employment

and/or large increases in the amount of forced or unforced leisure

time available to the average person, work and leisure would seem an

appropriate starting point for an assessment of the actual social

impact of IT.   

     First, the microchip has not put millions of people out of work

- although it is steadily eroding employment opportunities.  Mass

unemployment has not occurred as a result of computerization chiefly

because the introduction of computers into the workplace has been

much slower and messier than expected - for a variety of financial,

technical and managerial reasons. In some companies, computerization

has actually been accompanied by increased levels of employment. 

Unemployment may be regarded as unacceptably high in many OECD

countries, but economic recession and declining competitiveness are

mostly to blame. However, many manufacturers now have an active

policy of 'de-manning': when and if economic growth does return to

its former levels, labour will not be taken on pro rata and increased

investment in IT may actually reduce the number of jobs available.

There is also concern about the service sector's continuing ability

to create jobs and a growing realisation that the high-tech sector

itself will remain small relative to total employment. 

Second, the vast majority who are in the workforce appear to be

working harder than ever. There is very little sign of the "leisure"

society having arrived yet!  According to one survey, the amount of

leisure time enjoyed by the average US citizen shrunk by a staggering

37 per cent between 1973 and 1989. Over the same period, the average

working week, including travel-to-work time, grew from under 41 hours

to nearly 47 hours - a far cry from the 22 hours someone predicted in

1967! (Gibbs 1989).  Note that these increases occurred just as

computers, robots, word processors and other "labour-saving" gadgetry

were entering the workplace.  Moreover, the proportion of Americans

holding down a second job or doing more work at home has been

increasing, due to inflation and other pressures on the domestic

standard of living.  Much the same sort of thing appears to be

happening in European countries like Germany, where weekend working

has been resumed in some industries, and in Australia, where 24-hour

working has been re-introduced, for example, in the coal industry. 

The Japanese, of course, continue to work longer hours than almost

everybody else and rarely take more than very short holidays.  

We are still awaiting the "workerless", "unmanned" or "fully-

automated" factory.  The "factory of the future" remains where it has

always been - somewhere in the future. Take industrial robots, for

example: analysts confidently predicted that the US robot population

would top 250,000 or more by 1990. The actual figure was 37,000 - and

some of these had already been relegated to training centres and

scrap metal dealers (Kilborn 1990). Worldwide robot sales actually

peaked in 1987 and have been going downhill ever since, primarily

because users have found that the care and feeding of robots is more

costly than that of people.  General Motors wasted millions on

premature robotization and robot makers have gone bust all over the

place - victims of their own exaggerated claims.  Even CNC (computer

numerically controlled) machine tools, which have been around for

some time, are not as widely used as might be expected: one study

found that only 11 per cent of machine tools in the US metalworking

industry were CNC; 53 per cent of the plants surveyed did not have

even one automated machine! (Harvard 1988).  

While the robot revolution has been stalled, other panaceas such as

"FMS" (flexible manufacturing systems) and "CIM" (computer-integrated

manufacturing) have been stillborn.  FMS has rarely progressed beyond

the "showcase" stage and has proved to be an expensive headache for

those few companies who have tried it in a real commercial

enterprise.  CIM remains a direction or a dream: connecting up all

the "islands" of automation is taking much longer than expected.

Full implementation of CIM would require the encoding of all relevant

management expertise into decision-making devices which would then

control fault-free machines without human intervention - this seems

somewhat unlikely in the short term.  MAP (manufacturing automation

protocol) was supposed to be the breakthrough which would enable

machines to "talk" to each other, but it was slow to catch on and it

has been overtaken by a number of other incompatible, competing

protocols like OSI.  In general, manufacturers have had to revise

their automation strategies - steady upgrading seems to have replaced

the 1980s concept of total automation. 

The "paperless" office now looks to be one of the funniest

predictions made  about the social impact of IT.  More and more trees

are being felled to satisfy our vast appetite for paper, in offices

which were supposed by now to be all-electronic.  In the US, paper

consumption has rocketed 320 per cent over the past 30 years, ahead

of real GDP which has gone up 280 per cent (Tenner 1988). In absolute

terms, this means that US consumers gobbled up about 4 trillion pages

of paper last year, compared with only 2.5 trillion in 1986 - about

the time that word processors and personal computers were becoming

really popular. The two most successful office products of recent

times - the photocopier and the fax machine - are of course enormous

users or generators of paper, while technologies which do not use

paper - such as electronic mail and voice mail - have been slow to

catch on.  The overall market for "office automation" equipment is

not as strong as it was in the 1980s, but sales of desktop laser

printers are booming - and of course they also consume vast amounts

of paper.  EDI (electronic document interchange) might help reduce

paper consumption in the future, but it will be some time before it

becomes a significant force. 

Despite the huge increase in telephone usage and the existence of

electronic mail and videotex, old-fashioned surface mail - much of it

paper-intensive "junk" mail - is still growing in volume in most

industrial countries.  Paper-using "junk faxes" are also on the

increase.  Banks still rely on paper to a surprising degree, despite

EFT (electronic funds transfer) and plastic transaction cards. A

recent IBM study estimated that 95 per cent of information in

business enterprises is still in paper form (Markoff 1988).  It has

also been suggested (Business Week, 3 June 1991) that only 1 per cent

of all the information in the world is stored on computers. The US

Pentagon recently declared "war" on paper: apart from the normal

paper problems of all unwieldy bureaucracies, the Pentagon now has to

cope with the huge amounts of documentation which go with complex

high-tech weapons systems.  For example, a typical US Navy cruiser

puts to sea with no less than 26 tonnes of manuals for its weapons

systems - enough to affect the performance of the vessel! (Seghers

1989). 

While with hindsight it was perhaps unreasonable to have expected

that automated factories and offices would be a reality by now, are

we at least moving in right direction?  Surely the huge amount of

spending on IT equipment has had some positive impact, particularly

on productivity?  Unfortunately, the studies available all indicate

that the productivity pay-off from IT has been somewhat slow in

coming - in fact, it is hard to detect any pay-off at all!  This

certainly appears to be the case in manufacturing. In the service

sector, including banking and commerce, education and health care,

productivity seems actually to have declined in recent years

(although this conclusion is apparently based on aggregate figures

which would appear to mask what has been achieved in individual firms

and organisations). 

There are many possible explanations for this apparent paradox: the

favourite is that there is a "learning curve" associated with IT.

Thus it will be some time before we - and in particular, IT managers

- learn to use the stuff properly.  Typically in offices, potential

productivity gains are frittered away through computer glitches, the

excessive re-drafting of documents, endless retraining, idle chatter

and even game-playing: in one recent survey of 750 US executives, 66

per cent of respondents said that they regularly used their computer

for playing games - this did not include playing around with

spreadsheets and the like (Fortune, 5 June 1989). Half of these

actually admitted to playing games in office hours - in fact, this

recreation activity was overwhelming preferred to lunchtime drinking

and intra-office sex (which is, of course, very tricky in modern,

open-plan offices). 

THE HOME: WHERE IS THE "ELECTRONIC COTTAGE"?

One of the most pervasive myths of the IT revolution is that large

numbers of people will "soon" be working from home, shopping from

home and banking from home. The appealing notion of the "electronic

cottage" was first made popular by writers such as Alvin Toffler (who

gave a new verb to the English language - to "toffle", as in

"waffle"). The general idea was that the Industrial Revolution had

taken people out of their homes - and now the IT revolution would

allow them to return. It has since become a recurring theme in the

literature on the social impact of computers and has become firmly

implanted in the public consciousness as an allegedly widespread

social trend. 

The only problem with this attractive scenario is that it is not

happening. There is very little evidence to suggest that increasing

numbers of people are working from home full-time, although some

professionals are doing more work at home using their "electronic

briefcase".  Most surveys would seem to indicate that only about 10

per cent of the total workforce in the US and Europe work from home

full-time on a variety of tasks, just as they have always done.

Despite some well-publicized high-tech homeworking experiments -

which have typically been on a small scale and have usually been

abandoned after a while - the number of actual "telecommuters" who

use IT equipment to process and transmit their work rather than

physically commute to work remains very small. One authority who has

studied telecommuting for the best part of a decade recently

concluded that it is "not a significant phenomenon"(Olson 1989). 

The reasons why high-tech homeworking has not taken off are

instructive. Proponents have glossed over basic problems like the

space constraints in most houses and apartments, the fact that there

are not many occupations which can be carried on at home and the

managerial problems faced by the employers of homeworkers.  But most

important of all, the technocrats who have advocated increased

telecommuting as a possible solution to traffic congestion and air

pollution have seriously underestimated the human or psychological

problems of working at home. Almost without exception, high-tech

homeworkers report a host of problems such as increased family

conflict, neighbourhood noise, loneliness, inability to divide work

from leisure, workaholism, stress and burnout - I should know, I

worked from home full-time for seven years whilst bringing up a young

family and experienced most of them!  (Of five other homeworkers I

followed in the UK, only one continued to work at home on a long-term

basis.) 

If relatively few people will be working at home in years to come,

will more people be staying at home and using IT-based gadgetry for

entertainment purposes, to access videotex information services, and

to bank, shop and even vote from their living rooms?  Certainly, the

200 million VCRs sold worldwide cannot be ignored, nor can current

sales of CD players, camcorders, video games consoles and other

consumer electronics goods. But in general the evidence of increased

participation to date is not encouraging and as Schnaars (1989)

points out, some famous market research firms have consistently

overestimated the market for home banking, shopping and information

services. 

Fewer than 1 per cent of US households use any kind of videotex

information service, even though it was predicted in 1980 that 5 per

cent of all US households would be hooked up by 1985 (Brody 1991).

Britain's Prestel still languishes with a small and declining user

base.  Even videotex boosters now admit that information services

offering such things as constant news and weather updates, current

stock prices and flight times are likely to have only limited appeal.

Moreover, videotex is not easy to use, it is slow and it is

inflexible. It is also costly and most consumers have been unwilling

to pay for mere information. The only videotex system in the world to

attract a mass audience is the French Minitel system which boasts

about 2.5 million terminals.  But even in the case of Minitel, there

are signs that the novelty of, for example, exchanging sexy messages,

is wearing thin. 

Home banking has failed to take off in the US and Europe. The two

most successful US experiments were the Bank of America's service in

San Francisco (with 15,000 claimed customers) and the Chemical Bank's

Pronto system in New York (a reported 21,000 subscribers), while the

Verbraucher Bank of Hamburg, Germany, claimed the most subscribers in

the world (50,000) for its service.  But these totals were a far cry

from the massive numbers envisaged when the services were launched in

the early 1980s. Chemical Bank closed down Pronto in 1988.  Several

small-scale experiments in the UK went nowhere. There is talk in

Japan of home banking being re-launched using the millions of

Nintendo consoles in Japanese living rooms, but basically home

banking must be deemed a flop. Home banking has two basic drawbacks:

it can't be used for cash transactions and most consumers don't do

enough banking to justify the initial costs or recurring charges.

Quite simply, it's not very useful and customers aren't demanding it. 

Indeed, the continued importance of cash in the "cashless" society we

were promised is another great paradox of the IT revolution. ATMs

(automated teller machines) have become very popular with consumers -

precisely because they dispense cash.  Despite plastic cards and EFT-

POS (recently abandoned in New Zealand), the number of bank notes in

circulation shows no sign of diminishing - and in Australia, for

example, is in fact increasing in line with GDP. 

Home shopping or teleshopping has also failed miserably. The most

famous home shopping schemes were Knight-Ridder's Viewtron experiment

in Florida, Times-Mirror's Gateway service in California and Centel's

Keyfax service in Chicago.  Many saw Viewtron as the pioneer and it

was heavily promoted. Users could shop, bank, catch up with the news

and access databases without leaving their living room.  But Knight-

Ridder managed to sign up only 5,000 customers and Viewtron was shut

down in 1986 after losing an astonishing $50 million (Zinn 1989).

Attempts to get home shopping going in the UK were also unsuccessful.

Home shopping failed because of practical problems such as

complicated on-screen instructions, difficulties over payments,

problems with delivery times and a lack of choice of products. It

also failed to meet the psychological needs of shoppers: many people

enjoy shopping, especially the social aspect.  Shopping offers people

the chance to get out of the house, to perhaps bump into friends and

to re-acquaint themselves with their local community. 

Likewise, suggestions by, for example, Toffler, Naisbitt and Williams

that the IT revolution would lead to "push-button voting", to the

holding of "electronic town meetings" and the creation of a

"teledemocracy" have proved to be wide of the mark.  Despite

increased access to information and communication technologies,

electoral turnout in the US and most other Western democracies

continues to decline.  Arterton (1987) recently looked at 13 major

"teledemocracy" experiments in the US and found that their impact on

political participation levels was only marginal because of the

powerful forces working against increased involvement - chiefly the

fact that people are so bombarded with media messages that they

actually absorb less and less. Teledemocracy is unlikely to cure

America's severe turnout problem, let alone lead to a transformation

of the political system. 

Thus it seems that many commentators have overestimated the capacity

for IT-based gadgetry to transform domestic lifestyles. The argument

that developments in consumer electronics, computers and

telecommunications will dramatically alter the nature of economic and

social activity in the home is not supported by the available

evidence.  Despite the arrival of microwaves, food processors, VCRs,

CD players, big-screen TVs, answering machines, home faxes, word

processors and portable phones, home life remains basically the same.

Moreover, a succession of revolutionary "homes of the future"

incorporating various "home automation" systems have been built in

the US and Europe in recent decades, but by and large they have left

consumers cold.  A recent UK study found that people could do with a

few extra warning lights and such on their cookers, but they were not

bothered about home robots, futuristic wall-based screens, home

terminals and automated lighting systems.

The same sort of miscalculation has been made in relation to schools.

There is as yet not much sign of the "classroom revolution" taking

place and the idea of human teachers being replaced by automated

teaching machines still sounds just as fanciful as it always did.  A

recent OTA (Office of Technology Assessment) report in the US pointed

out that classrooms have changed very little in the last 50 years -

unlike, say, offices or operating theatres.  Despite a huge influx of

personal computers into US schools, there is still only one for every

30 pupils on average (OTA 1988).  But even this expenditure is being

queried by some educationalists, who argue, among other things, that

more money should be spent on books and better teachers rather than

computers, that much educational software is trivial and of limited

educational value, that the use of computers in class tends only to

have a short-term novelty value and that the whole notion of

"computer literacy" does not stand up to close examination (eg,

Rosenberg 1991). 

WHY TECHNOLOGY PREDICTIONS GO WRONG

Obviously those industry analysts, forecasters, academics and writers

who have made predictions in the past which have turned out to be

completely wrong do not tend to publicize their own mistakes, let

alone examine in public just where and why they went wrong.  But

recently two writers have attempted to explain why so many technology

forecasts go awry. 

Schnaars (1989) re-examined major US efforts to forecast the future

of technology and found they had missed the mark not by a matter of

degree, but completely.  For example, top scientists and leading

futurists in the 1960s had predicted that by now we would be living

in plastic houses, travelling to work by personal vertical take-off

aircraft, farming the ocean floors and going for holidays on the

moon.  Robots would be doing the housework, working farms, fighting

wars for us, and so on. The best result of these forecasts was a

success rate of about 15 per cent.  Most others failed miserably -

chiefly, says Schnaars, because the authors had been seduced by

technological wonder. They were far too optimistic both about the

abilities of new technologies and the desire of consumers to make use

of them.  The forecasts were driven by utopian visions rather than

practicalities and hard realities. An especially common mistake of

the 1960s predictions was to assume that existing rates of

technological innovation and diffusion would continue.  Schnaars thus

comes to the astonishing conclusion:  "There is almost no evidence

that forecasters, professionals and amateurs alike have any idea what

our technological future will look like." 

Likewise, Brody (1988a, 1991) went back and looked at the forecasts

made by leading US market research firms about the commercial

prospects for robots, CD-ROMs, artificial intelligence, videotex,

superconductors, Josephson junctions, gallium arsenide chips, and so

on.  In almost every case, he found that the market researchers had

grossly exaggerated the market for each product, sometimes by a

factor of hundreds. The main reason for this appallingly low  level

of accuracy was that the researchers had mostly got their information

from vested interests such as inventors and vendors. A second lesson

was that new technologies often did not succeed because there was

still plenty of life left in old technologies. Consumers in

particular were loathe to abandon what they knew for something that

offered only a marginal improvement on the old.  Predictions based on

simple trend extrapolation were nearly always wrong and forecasters

often neglected to watch for developments in related fields. They

also failed to distinguish between technology trends and market

forecasts and they greatly underestimated the time needed for

innovations to diffuse throughout society.

(Part 1 of 2 Parts. Part 2 will be published in EFFector Online 4.2)

                         ===========

Opening Address to International Conference on the Information

Society, Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute / Green Meadow Foundation,

Zurich, Switzerland, 18 November 1991

                         ===========

                   -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-

                 THE 24-STAGE SOFTWARE TEST:

alpha:      It compiles!

beta:       It runs on Joe's machine.

gamma:      It runs on Kate's machine, too.

delta:      It runs on the network.

epsilon:    It's stopped running on Kate's machine.

zeta:       It runs on all machines, but Report crashes.

eta:        It crashes with HIMEM.SYS.

theta:      It crashes without HIMEM.SYS.

iota:       It crashes with a serial printer.

kappa:      It works!  But the spec has changed.

lambda:     It runs, but mysteriously at half the speed of before.

mu:         It crashes the network.

nu:         It crashes Kate's machine with HIMEM.SYS, Joe's without.

xi:         It runs, but the printout is garbage.

omicron:    As above, but crashes after printout sometimes.

pi:         It sometimes crashes.

rho:        Kate thinks it works, but it turns out she's running lambda.

sigma:      No luck yet.

tau:        Aha, sorted out the printout.

upsilon:    Nearly there -- jus tneed to tidy up the help text.

phi:        It won't run at all on anything.

chi:        Yippee!  It runs perfectly on all the machines in the world.

psi:        It runs on all the machines in the world except tat idiot's

            from Basingstoke with the customised Amstrad and DOS 4.01.

omega:      It won't compile.

                   -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-

              EFF EXPLAINS ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGES

Mitchell Kapor, Chairman and President of the Electronic Frontier

Foundation (EFF), today explained several organizational moves and

initiatives approved by the EFF Board at its November 10, 1992 meeting in

San Francisco. According to Kapor, "they are designed to increase our

effectiveness in making EFF into a national public education, advocacy,

membership, and chapters organization that represents and serves our

growing constituency on the electronic frontier."

Berman Becomes Acting Executive Director

Kapor stated that "Jerry Berman, who currently heads our

Washington Office, has been designated by the EFF board to serve

as the interim Executive Director of EFF with present overall

responsibility for managing the activities of our Cambridge and

Washington, D.C. offices. In this capacity, he will oversee EFF's public

policy, membership, and chapter building activities."

Berman said: "I am delighted to be working with Cliff Figallo, our

Cambridge Office Director and the entire EFF staff and Board.  In the next

two months we will be making a concerted effort to develop a plan to make

EFF into a more effective and powerful public interest organization."

Chapters Summit

On January, 23 and 24, 1993, EFF will hold a "chapters summit" in Atlanta,

Georgia. Dave Farber, EFF Board Member, stated that the

meeting would be "an open, candid sharing of views about chapter

relations with EFF and EFF's relations with chapters with the goal of

making the chapters an integral part of the EFF mission." The

meeting is being organized by a steering committee made up of Cliff

Figallo, Jerry Berman, Dave Farber and representatives from

chapters and potential chapters including Mitch Ratcliffe and Jon

Lebkowsky .

(More)

Mitchell Kapor to Chair EFF Board and Oversee Critical Policy Studies

and Initiatives

Mitchell Kapor, who serves as Chairman of the EFF Board, has

turned over management functions to Berman and Figallo to devote

his energy and talents to developing EFF strategy and public policy

initiatives, such as a pragmatic program for achieving an open

broadband communications network and an exploration of the

potential role of the cable television network in serving as a

interactive, multimedia electronic communications highway. Kapor

will also continue to lead EFF's current public policy initiative to

develop a near term digital path to the home designed to maximize

free speech, innovation, and privacy.

Permanent Executive Director

The EFF Board, once it has developed and approved an overall

strategic plan in January, will proceed with an open search for a

permanent Executive Director for the organization.

                   -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-

                    REMARKS FROM LITTLE ROCK

Dr. Ross Alan Stapleton posted a portion of the remarks made at

yesterday's economic summit in Little Rock (12/14/92). 

Here's a little more to get a flavor possible future policy debates.

ALLEN (AT&T): A focus on infrastructure including information networks,

commercial networks which are interconnected, interoperable, national

and global, needs to be encouraged.... I think the government should

not build and/or operate such networks.  I believe that that private

sector can be and will be incented to build these networks, to enhance

them and to make it possible for people to connect with people and people

with information any place in the world.

   I do think, however, that the government role can be strong in the

sense of first increasing investment in civilian research and

precompetitive technologies.  Secondly, supporting the effective transfer

of that technology to the private sector.  Thirdly, establishing and

promulgating technical standards, which are so important to be sure that

networks and devices work together and play together....

VP-Elect Al GORE: I fully agree when it comes to conventional networks and

the new networks that your industry is now in the process of building. 

But with the advanced high-capacity networks like the NREN, it does seem

to me that government ought to play a role in putting in place that

backbone.  Just as no private investor was willing to build the interstate

highway system but once it was built, then a lot of other roads connected

to it.  This new very broadband network, most people think ought to be

built by the federal government and then transitioned into private

industry.  You didn't mean to disagree with that view when you said

government shouldn't play a role did you?

Allen: Yes, I may disagree.

President-Elect CLINTON:  I was hoping we'd have one disagreement.

                   -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-

"As life moves to this electronic frontier, politicians and

corporations are starting to exert increasing control over the

new digital realm, policing information highways with growing

strictness. Before we even realise we're there, we may find

ourselves boxed into a digital ghetto, denied simple rights of

access, while corporations and government agencies make out their

territory and roam free. So who will oppose the big guys? Who's

going to stand up for our digital civil liberties? Who has the

techno-literacy necessary to ask a few pertinent questions about

what's going down in cyberspace? Perhaps the people who have been

living there the longest might have a few answers."

                                               --Mark Bennett

                   -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-

         MEMBERSHIP IN THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION

If you support our goals and our work, you can show that support by

becoming a member now. Members receive our bi-weekly electronic

newsletter, EFFector Online, the @eff.org newsletter

and special releases and other notices on our activities.  But because

we believe that support should be freely given, you can receive these

things even if you do not elect to become a member.

Our memberships are $20.00 per year for students, $40.00 per year for

regular members.  You may, of course, donate more if you wish.

Our privacy policy: The Electronic Frontier Foundation will never, under

any circumstances, sell any part of its membership list.  We will, from

time to time, share this list with other non-profit organizations whose

work we determine to be in line with our goals. If you do not grant

explicit permission, we assume that you do not wish your membership

disclosed to any group for any reason.

---------------- EFF MEMBERSHIP FORM ---------------

Mail to: The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Inc.

    155 Second St. #41

    Cambridge, MA 02141

I wish to become a member of the EFF  I enclose:$__________

    $20.00 (student or low income membership)

    $40.00 (regular membership)

    $100.00(Corporate or company membership.

    This allows any organization to

    become a member of EFF. It allows

    such an organization, if it wishes

    to designate up to five individuals

    within the organization as members.)

    I enclose an additional donation of $

Name:

Organization:

Address:

City or Town:

State:     Zip:    Phone:(    )     (optional)

FAX:(    )    (optional)

Email address:

I enclose a check [  ]   .

Please charge my membership in the amount of $

to my Mastercard [  ]     Visa [  ]    American Express [ ]

Number:

Expiration date:

Signature:

Date:

I hereby grant permission to the EFF to share my name with

other non-profit groups from time to time as it deems

appropriate   [  ]  .

      Initials:

Your membership/donation is fully tax deductible.

=====================================================================

     EFFector Online is published by

     The Electronic Frontier Foundation

     155 Second Street, Cambridge MA 02141

     Phone: +1 617 864 0665 FAX: +1 617 864 0866

     Internet Address: eff@eff.org

 Reproduction of this publication in electronic media is encouraged.

 Signed articles do not necessarily represent the view of the EFF.

 To reproduce signed articles individually, please contact the authors

 for their express permission.

=====================================================================

     This newsletter is printed on 100% recycled electrons.