NY Times story

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Material excerpted from:


Who Will Control the Digital Flow:
A Digital Democracy or Just More TV?


by Steve Lohr
New York Times
October 18, 1993


...  In broad terms there are two very different ways it [the information 
highway] might develop.


In the broadcast model, by far the least radical of the options, entertainment 
would be the driving force, leading to what has been called the 500-channel 
future.  In some of the first commercial uses envisioned for the information 
highway, like video-on-demand and interactive home-shopping, 
entertainment and advertising would be sent to consumers who are passive 
recipients deciding only on what movie to watch or what goods to buy.  This 
might take the notion of television as the opiate of the masses to a dizzying 
extreme - "freebasing television," in the words of john Perry Barlow, a lyricist
 
for the Grateful Dead who has turned to technology writing.


"We don't want to build an information infrastructure that is eight lanes one 
way and a footpath the other way," said Mitchell Kapor, the software 
entrepreneur and chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a 
nonprofit high-tech policy group.


Mr. Kapor would rather see the highway modeled along the lines of the 
Internet, the vast computer-communications network that began as a 
government experiment in 1969 and now connects an estimated 15 million 
people world-wide.  On the Net, as the group of computer networks is 
known, anyone with a personal computer and a modem can send and receive 
information to anyone else.  People on the net constantly exchange 
information and views on thousands of different computer bulletin boards 
including ones for Chaucer scholars, foot fetishists, particle physicists, and 
fans of "Beverly Hills, 90210".


This diverse egalitarian nature is what advocates like Mr. Kapor want 
preserved in the "rules of the road" for the information highway.  They want 
a "common carrier" lane on the electronic highway so that, as with the 
telephone system, everyone has affordable access to the new highway  
"Otherwise we will increase the gap between the haves and have-nots in our 
society," Mr. Kapor said.


They also want the system to be very much two-way, or interactive so that 
anyone could become an electronic publisher, distributing information, 
holding televised cooking classes, or telecommuting to the doctor by showing 
a sore throat or the baby's rash to a video camera.


...