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When the White House thought advanced technology meant little more than
Stealth bombers and smart missiles, Al Gore was a senator from Tennessee
seeking $500 million to study how the Internet could be extended for use
by schools, hospitals and other public organisations. Now as the Vice President,
with power to give the technological bee in his bonnet a sting, he’s taken
on the job of seeing the US safely through the maturing of the information
age.

Gore’s advocacy of a National Information Infrastructure, dubbed the
‘information superhighway’, resonates round the world in cabinet meetings
and board rooms. Already a new ‘telemedia’ industry – drawn from companies
in telecommunications, the media, computing and consumer electronics – is
emerging to take advantage of technological developments that are making
this networking revolution possible.

But the speed of change has meant that most companies have only just
begun to wake up to the possibilities. ‘A couple of years ago companies
like (California’s) Pacific Bell and (Japan’s) NTT couldn’t have cared less,’
says Howard Rheingold, a writer on computer culture who lives in Sausalito,
near San Francisco. Just 18 months ago, when Gore was on the presidential
campaign trail with Bill Clinton, Rheingold got a call from a senior aide
at one of the largest telephone companies in the US. The official was asking
whether the company should be interested in telemedia. ‘I told him: ‘Go
back and ask your chief executive if he wants to be owned by a cable TV
company next year’,’ says Rheingold. Now, he observes, ‘billions of dollars
are being mobilised’ as companies look forward to the profits they see flowing
their way down the superhighway.

It shouldn’t be a surprise really. Gore quotes figures predicting that
by 2000, telecommunications (including manufacture, installation and use)
will be the US’s biggest export earner, and the largest business in the
world. Already it accounts for just under 15 per cent of US GNP.

In January, Gore laid out his plans for loosening the federal telecoms
regulations that presently keep telephone, cable TV and entertainment companies
carefully separate. In 1982, AT&T’s national phone monopoly was broken
up: AT&T retained most of the long-distance services and the ‘Baby Bells’
took the local telephone services. Cable TV operators followed, installing
their own networks in cities. Telephone companies can’t broadcast TV; cable
companies can’t offer phone services. Neither can make equipment. And TV
companies may own cable broadcasters, but not the physical network that
transmits the programmes.

Gore plans to tear all those walls down, opening the Baby Bells’ networks
to any company, cable operators included, that wishes to offer phone services.
In exchange, the Baby Bells will be allowed to provide cable TV down their
existing lines. The idea is to ensure that, whatever the service, there
are two or more companies competing to provide it, and any company that
wants to offer a service over a network will be able to buy access to that
network. In return, Gore wants to see universal, perhaps free, access to
the networks by the end of the decade for public bodies such as schools,
hospitals and libraries.

Leading the expected money makers is super-TV: thousands of channels
of interactive, high-definition, Video-U-Like. Rheingold sees it otherwise.
‘That’s like saying, when they were getting ready to build the Interstate
highways, that the roads were great news for the asphalt business. I mean,
they were, but there are far more important effects.’

The deregulation marks a fundamental shift away from the enforced antimonopolistic
laws of the past. And it raises equally fundamental questions. Suddenly,
the power of network access will become highly concentrated. ‘There’s a
very small number of people controlling this giant machine,’ says Rheingold,
who has long been active in promoting electronic communities and grassroots
organisations. But he doesn’t think those people will have it all their
own way. In time, the real power could rest with the users as they become
adept at manipulating the networks, helped by the powerful PCs and intelligent
set-top boxes that will be the networks’ nodes. ‘It’s a Trojan horse,’ says
Rheingold, ‘with the nodes of the network growing in intelligence, like
crystals growing in a supersaturated solution.’

He expects consumers to use these digital feeds to make their own links,
to talk to each other without the interference of a corporate agent, to
establish their own virtual communities. But he recognises that the opposite
might happen if legislators get it wrong – opening the way for the megacorporations
that control the wires to take over everyone’s life.

Critics point to the proposed $32 billion merger of Bell Atlantic (a
Baby Bell on the east coast of the US) and Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI),
one of the biggest cable TV companies, supplying almost one in four homes
in the US. The deal fell through at the end of February, for commercial
rather than regulatory reasons, but the company it had aimed to create would
have controlled access, through telephone or cable, to between 40 and 50
per cent of the homes in America. This estimate comes from a deadly commercial
rival – Sumner Redstone, chief executive of the communications and TV production
company Viacom (which itself paid $10 billion for another entertainments
company, Paramount, days before the TCI deal collapsed). But from his opposed
stance, Redstone hit on a key point. As he told a Senate monopolies committee
last October, the merged companies would control the fate of all programming
services in the US, including home shopping, video-on-demand and other undreamt-of
services. He asked the committee to put itself in the position of an operator
of a TV channel or similar service: if a merged Bell-TCI turned you down,
he said, your only salvation would be for every other cable and phone supplier
in the country to take the service – a task he called ‘an impossible hurdle’.

The only way to avoid that hurdle, say those involved in the business,
is to make sure that the widest possible choice of delivery methods is available.
If a number of companies are competing head-on to provide the same services,
and alternative physical links are easily available to every user, regulation
can be kept to a bare minimum. Don’t like your phone company? Get another
one to wire you up. Want them both? Then have them.

But it is in regulating for choice that Gore can make the big mistakes.
For instance, some commentators worry that in his enthusiasm to get things
moving quickly, he will regulate even the means of delivery. The view of
industry is that regulations need only dictate what the network owners must
offer in terms of access or price. How these services are provided should
be left to competition between companies. The worry is that if controls
apply specifically to one delivery path – optical fibre, for instance –
then big, resourceful companies will work around them by using wireless
links such as satellites, or by squeezing more data down copper wires.

Those are immediate questions for the regulators; but they will also
have to turn their attention to other aspects of a more networked society,
one which recalls the telescreens and ubiquitous monitoring of the world
of 1984. Take, for instance, the innocuous looking set-top box that will
take your instructions for interactive TV, and your orders for teleshopping
and view-on-demand videos. The data it delivers down the line will contain
a mass of information about your spending pattern, likes and dislikes that
will be much sought after by anyone wanting to sell you more of the same.
So who will that information belong to? To you, the subscriber? To the maker
of the box? Or to the owner of the wires or the videos? Will any of these
people be free to build up a profile of you, and if they do, how will you
know? And how will you be sure that they are correct?

Framing laws on these matters is one thing; policing them is something
else. Compared with what is to come, today’s computer databases are primitive.
But already personal credit rating agencies in the US know that they have
a severe problem: if the names of all the people with credit cards are consolidated
into one database, there are three times more names than there are in the
entire country. Something is already awry. Telemedia will not provide a
solution to that. In fact, the more ways there are to collect and analyse
data, the harder it will be to track down those who are misusing it. Telemedia
will release a torrent of personal data that could overwhelm existing mechanisms
for controlling it. The road to hell, it is said, is paved with good intentions.
Ignore the consequences, and Gore’s superhighway could just be a faster,
more modern way of getting there.