Networker: Whatever happened to the 'information superhighway'?

This is the age of the internet. The daily papers carry technology supplements
extolling the wonders that will soon descend. No reader can be left in
any doubt: better and better technology is about to solve every human need.
The future is here, and it is wonderful.

In reality, we are being exposed to a series of technological fads.
The current fad is “wireless application protocol”. This is the capacity
to deliver the internet via a mobile phone, palm-top computer, or other
sorts of “roaming” device.

Six months ago the fad was XML (the ability of computers of talk to
each other over the internet). Before that it was “voice over IP” (a plan
to replace the world's telephone networks with the internet). And before
that, something called “virtual private networks” (that would allow large
organisations to run national or global computer networks over the internet).

None of these has delivered the glowing promises. This is nothing new.
Many years ago the computer industry developed a concept called “vaporware”:
products which never arrive, or never do what they promise to.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the internet was protected from this, because
it was not considered a commercially viable “product”. It simply connected
people together and allowed them to get on with their work.

In the early 1990s, before the internet became the path to instant wealth
for the most awful people you could imagine, there was the “information
superhighway”. The virtues of this wonderful new method of receiving information
were also extolled in the daily press. In the media hype, “information”
meant Hollywood movies.

Most people who remember the information superhighway probably assume
that it became the internet, but this is not true. From a commercial point
of view the internet is a diversion from the main game, an accident of
technology which got in the way of profit.

That is why the internet is such a poor commercial proposition today.
Every time you buy a book from Amazon.com, the company loses money. Airline
tickets, groceries, and most other products sold over the internet, are
sold at a loss.

This was not the plan. If the internet had not come along, via expensive
proprietary connections, media organisations would have had a stranglehold
on a whole range of services which they would have charged top prices for.

Even the technology of the internet is “wrong”. The information superhighway
was to be based on a technology called “asynchronous transfer mode” (ATM).
Despite billions of dollars of investment by phone companies around the
world, this technology is in its dying gasps, being pushed aside by TCP/IP,
the internet's technology.

Does this matter to socialists? Who cares if data is carried in TCP/IP
“datagrams” or ATM “cells”? The answer is yes. The internet today was not
designed as a commercial distribution network. Its underlying technology
is one reason why the internet is so hard to police, and to turn to commercial
advantage, as compared to radio, television and satellite networks. That
does not mean the whole internet cannot be turned into a source of profit
for the media magnates. But at the moment it is only profitable for the
internet equipment and software manufacturers.

The heart of internet usage is currently outside the hands of the profiteers,
but they are knocking at the doors. The early March deal between Microsoft
and pay-TV software supplier NDS, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation,
is a sign of the times. Murdoch would love to turn the internet into a
television repeat, along the lines that the information superhighway was
meant to be.

Along with the hundreds of millions of people who use e-mail, chat sessions,
information access and other aspects of the internet, the progressive movement
has a stake in defending and extending its usefulness and accessibility.

By Greg Harris 

From GLW issue 398