Not because you're a bleeding heart, but because you're selfish.
"When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a Communist."
- Dom Helder Camara, Brazilian Roman Catholic archbishop, author, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee
One of the surest ways to get labeled a communist in cyberspace is to merely raise the question of universal service. To many, the idea of universal service - that ubiquitous access in and of itself is a worthy public policy goal - is inextricably linked to an archaic, centralized, paternalistic, and discredited approach to government. Some, such as John Browning - who championed his ideas in Wired 2.09 - would like to proclaim the concept dead, and be done with it.
But, like apple pie, baseball, and bombast in Oliver Stone movies, universal service is a fundamental part of America, and is not going to go away any time soon. Moreover, it shouldn't. There are good reasons - both selfish and high-minded - why we should try to achieve an effective form of universal service for the infobahn.
The monopoly on local telephone service is being broken up, haltingly but inevitably, and this in turn will break the method by which nearly universal phone service has been financed. Rigid, centralized attempts to achieve universal service for any future communications infrastructure just won't work in the brave new world of competitive, decentralized broadband networks.
So, fine - let's not be centralized. But let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. The basic reason that universal service has been an important goal of telecom policy since the 1930s is that Americans want the American experience to be inclusive and broadly participatory. Inclusiveness is important for both personal and community reasons, for the same reasons we have public schools and a federally funded interstate highway system.
We all benefit from the legacy of our interstate highway system, which provided money to pave roads in New York and North Dakota alike. Consider what would have happened if we had not established a national highway policy after World War II. Instead, let's say we just licensed right of ways to entrepreneurs, as was done in the 1980s with cellular telephony. We would have gotten some kind of interstate highway system, built by entrepreneurs. Granted, maybe it would have been built for less money. But the pricing and national coverage of this highway system would have resembled today's cellular telephone network. Certain parts of the country, such as the northeast megalopolis, would have developed four-lane roads fairly quickly. Other regional roadways, such as the I-5 corridor linking Seattle to Los Angeles, would have developed organically as well. But less well-trafficked areas would probably have been served by gravel roads for many years.
The biggest problem with locking in on a universal-access plan is that nobody knows what the essence of the infobahn will be. Fiber-optic cable to everyone's home? Specific applications such as video-on-demand or interactive home shopping? Even if we did know, which infobahn services would we consider truly essential? Basic e-mail? The multimedia successor to plain old telephone service? Anyone, including government officials, who deigned to "know" the answer today to any of these questions would be exhibiting only arrogance.
The best practical step we can take now is to broaden the range of trials being undertaken. For instance, why not persuade U S West and Time Warner that, in exchange for receiving regulatory approval for video-on-demand trials in places like Omaha, Nebraska, and the wealthy suburbs of Orlando, Florida, they should help subsidize nonprofit efforts to run trials in rural Nebraska and in Harlem. I'd bet that some foundations would kick in a few bucks, too. Such trials - combined with the continued organic growth of freenets, library-access programs, and other community-based projects - would generate meaningful information on which infobahn applications are essential to all Americans, and hence ought to eventually become the focus of universal-service programs.
While none of us knows exactly what services will develop over the nascent broadband network, I'd bet that nearly all Wired readers will agree that the infobahn will not be an ancillary service, but will be central to how Americans work, learn, and communicate. It is precisely because of this centrality that we need to talk about universal service - what it should be, what it should not be, and how we can achieve it. For without a thoughtful universal-service policy, cyberspace could well end up as alien and cost-prohibitive to the general public as venturing out of town was during the reign of medieval highway robbers.
