Re: Reality Check

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Responding to Frank Odasz  (franko@bigsky.dillon.mt.us)

>Will the big communications corporations preempt these budding
>'bottom-up' community networks? Citizens will determine the
>winners through their participation.

But not all citizens have the choice of determining such winners
if they don't have a community network in their area.

And there is a need for government subsidies to support the creation
and encouragement of such community networks as a matter of 
national policy (now some such get govt support in the U.S. while
other areas don't)

Forming a freenet or community network in a large metropolitian
area like New York City without government encouragement and support
seems virtually impossible.

Somehow there is a need to oversee what government does, rather than
remove government from the picture as only government can provide
for a broad policy that covers all areas of a country as large
as the U.S.

In the U.S. there are large multinational corporations with powerful
means to promote their interests. 

There is a need to have government help citizens deal with these
corporations - otherwise the basic obligations of a society to 
provide for the health and well being of the population are lost
out in the pressure of the big corporations to gain what they
can without any regard for the cost to society.

>The reality of the situation is that creating autonomously
>controlled local networks demonstrating the authenticity of
>widespread purposeful citizen participation can only be achieved
>through a "Win-Win" ongoing partnership between the builders, and
>the users, of our emerging National Information Infrastructure.

There is no emerging National Information Infrastructure. There is
the government paid for and built Internet which has been given
over to private entities without any concern for the public
opposition to this giveaway. (This public opposition was voiced
at the NTIA online conference in Nov. 1994 as well as in other
forums such as those help by the former OTA.)

Also, the history of the development of time sharing,
the ARPANET and then the Internet provides valuable lessons
toward broadening access to the Internet. Instead of studying
this history, however, there is a rush to throw out all the 
lessons.

Our online book "Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet
and the Internet" documents this history and demonstrates 
that government support for and even funding of computer
networking has been crucial. Even more importantly, government 
oversight over and encouragement of computer networking has led 
to a constantly evolving and valuable resource that has now put new
question on the fore such as how to make access to this available
to all. But it seems impossible to do so without looking at
the past history and development and building on it.


>Worse even, are discussions without leadership which are reduced
>to circular hodge-podge messaging, where the same issues are
>discussed over and over again with no one summarizing, archiving
>and disseminating former quality messages and "collected
>knowledge." When value and knowledge are not aggregated, and
>decisions not reached, forward progress is lost.

I agree that there is a need for archiving past Usenet materials
and also discussions mailing list discussions of important issues.

The NTIA online conference has been archived and there is a 
summary of it in our online book, but it didn't seem that most
of the people taking up these issues in this online seminar have
been pointed to that material and asked to build on it.

>It is the specific processes by which citizens aggregate
>knowledge and engage in purposeful public problem-solving,
>effectively, that we need to turn our focus. Without a national
>"knowledge collection" effort in understanding how to leverage
>these dynamics effectively, to allow us to define the direction
>forward in realizing our joint potential, we'll continue to
>be...virtually clueless.

But the problem isn't with people.

There is clearly a battle on now, with big corporate interests in
the U.S. trying to grab what they can despite whose expense.

And we haven't figured out a way to make the U.S. govt recognize
that there are citizens in the U.S. (not just customers for
the corporations). Hence the corporate interests are expending
all manner and means to have government entities act in their 
interests, and there seem few means for the citizen and the Netizen
to have their voices heard beyond that of the Internet. And thus there 
is no real desire for corporate interests to make Usenet or 
email available to all in the U.S. but they are interested in
making web access to their ads (or even email access to their
ads) available to all.

We don't want www access to ads, and want to find a way to stop
such commercial ads from polluting Usenet or email.

We want and need to be able to communicate with each other,
to hear our problems and try to help each other find solutions.

That is the promise the Internet holds out, but there is a 
need to get government officials like the FCC or Congress 
recognize that there are Netizens and citizens who have a right 
and need to be heard and it is important that there be such 
means available.

Ronda
rh120@columbia.edu

----------
            Netizens: On the History and Impact
                 of Usenet and the Internet
           http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/

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