Public Policy and a Look at the Future
The Access Issue
by Mary Gardiner Jones and Nancy Chasen

As the technologies of telecommunications bound forward, complex and important public policy issues are sure to emerge. The federal government is in the midst of a serious debate as to whether, and if so, how to assemble and disseminate electronically its vast storehouse of data. The telephone companies are on the verge of entering the information world. Increasing numbers of companies are involved in exploring the potentials of videotex and data base development. It is our job as citizens and citzen leaders to see that these policy issues are resolved appropriately.

It is universally agreed that information is the key to effective political, economic and social participation in society. As electronic communications increasingly replace their more traditional print predecessors, the gap between the technologically literate and illiterate can have serious overtones on the ability of citizens not only to cope with the daily demands of every day living but to participate generally in the social, economic, and political life in society. If citizens are not to sink into an information poverty with almost as drastic results to their humanity as the more familiar economic poverty, then the information and telecommunications technologies must be harnessed to their use with even greater urgency than the need to harness them for business use.

As more information services are delivered electronically, traditional face to face and print vehicles for dissemination will become less available and more costly - again, exacerbating the gap between the ordinary citizen and business and between the haves and the have-nots in society. If only the most sophisticated and affluent citizens have access to these technologies, or if data bases are only developed for those most able to pay for them, then the wealth of the telecommunications services which can be made available through these technologies will only serve to widen - rather than eliminate - the information and power gaps which exist already too broadly throughout our society.

The goal must be some form of universal access. The challenge is to design imaginative citizen political, economical, and social information programs and networks of publicly located terminals in libraries, shopping malls, bus terminals, citizens centers, post offices, social security and employment offices, hospital waiting rooms and the like to ensure effective citizen access.

Physical access to information systems will be meaningless and a waste of resources unless these information systems are affordable. Thus telephone rates and usage charges will directly affect which members of the public can afford to access these systems and must be of concern to policy makers.

Of equal importance to citizen access is the diversity of information and telecommunications services which are available to the public and which respond to the breadth of interests and real needs of consumers. This raises a different type of access issue. Access by information providers to the major information systems becomes of critical importance. Information providers can range from governmental or private social service agencies and citizens or public interest nonprofit organizations to newspapers, travel agencies, advertisers, or other commercial entities who wish to develop, sell or disseminate information to the public. There must be some system to ensure that all information providers will have access to the principle electronic networks with the broadest reach to all segments of the public.

At present, most of the existing information systems claim the right to determine for themselves what information they will carry and with which information or service providers they will deal. Already issues of access have arisen in the United States as to the rights of competitors not to be excluded from a local cable system offering transactional services to the public. The entry of the Bell telephone companies into the information business is being hotly debated in terms of the potential additional competition which they might interject into the market and fears about the anticompeitive potential they might present to the market by reason of their dual role as network transmission owners and providers of information services. Public interest and other non-commercial organizations with data bases on automobiles, travel frauds, nursing home safety records or product ingredients will have a similar interest in accessing information systems offering data on related commercial inforamtion or transactional services. Political candidates, issue oriented organizations and legislators and government policy offices must also have effective electronic access to the citizens in their communities.

In Europe, most of the information systems, whether private or public, are run essentially on a public utility concept analagous to our telephone and telegraph systems open to all who wish to use these services as users or information providers. In the United States, the ongoing information networks are operated either by the media (cable, newspaper and other publishers) or other private industry entity. Where the media are the system providers, the selection of the information to be made available can be expected to follow the traditional media concepts based on their established right of program and content determination limited only by their legal and political accountability to the public for the way in which they discharge their role. It is unlikely that these media would be receptive to any concept of a right of access to their information systems by independent information providers.

The information systems developed by traditional commercial entities have no tradition of public service. The responsiveness of their information offerings to individual needs depends essentially on the size of the demand, the ability of the consumer to pay and the respecitve profitability involved in offering one data base or service over another.

The dynamics of media public service responsibility and of profitability may not be sufficient to ensure that the full potentials of the information society are in fact effectively available to all citizens for their full range of potential applications. Tele-medicine and tele-education, to mention only two possible applications of the new technologies, have never traditionally been fields which society has been willing to leave entirely to the private sector. Community and social services have typically been the responsibility of the public and nonprofit sectors available to the public without regard to their ability to pay. Marketplace information and documentation about most public policy issues, such as nuclear energy, environmental costs and benefits, carcinogen and other health hazards in foods, etc. have fallen into a kind of netherland with neither government nor the private sector meeting the full needs of citizens.

There is little reason to believe that this situation will change if the information providers and system operators under the new technologies continue to operate under the traditions of the media or the private sector's profitability requirements. Moreover, the current trends towards commercializing information will restrict even more the access to information to those able to pay.

If, moreover, a pure market place model is adopted exclusively for the development of the new information technologies and information is treated purely as a commodity and less and less as public good, then public institutions which have been traditionally the dispensers of information to the public, such as governmental agencies, libraries, schools and the like may find it difficult to resist the claims of unfair competition from the private sector anxious to disseminate the same information. Under such circumstances, the general public may find itself with less access to information and its distribution throughout society may become less equitable rather than more.

We have to find a way whereby access to telecommunication networks and services cannot be denied to either providers of these services or to citizens desiring to use them.

Some of the access questions which need to be addressed, therefore, must include:

* Are the present public access practices of information
providers and cable companies, together with the
proliferation of different types of computer, telephone and
cable-based information systems and information providers
sufficient to ensure adequate diversity and effective
access to meet consumer needs;

* To what extent should society follow the educational public
school model or the commercial free market model or some mix
of the two in responding to the public interest in ensuring
the broadest possible access to information and
telecommunications systems;

* How can we ensure that data base and telecommunications
services are developed adn disseminated so as to meet the
needs of all citizens and not simply the needs of the
commercial sector in our society;

* Is there a need for direct government activity as funder or
operator of some aspects of these systems, or for indirect
government subsidies or other form of incentive such as the
establishment of mixed public/private partnerships or other
techniques to supplement the activities of the private
sector:

- in the development and dissemination of hardware;

- the transmission of telecommunications services;

- the design of innovative search techniques.

* Should content and transmission of the private sector's
telecommunication services be separated or should the
private sector configuration of these services be
supplemented by a governmental or non-commercial network
available to all comers?

Clearly some government role in ensuring access to these information technologies by both consumer and information providers will be essential. Nonprofit organizations have important stakes, both for themselves as potential information providers and users and for their constituents, to participate actively in efforts to resolve these issues of access so that the legitimate rights and needs of all citizens, individual and corporate, as both information users and providers are responded to.

Author's note: This material is excerpted from a booklet, "The Potential of Telecommunications for Non Profit Organizations," published by the Consumer Interest Research Institute, 1631 Suter's Lane N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007 (202) 333-6035.