If this is the information superhighway, where are the rest stops?

Common Cause Magazine, Spring, 1994 by Deborah Baldwin

In a brave new world, consumer advocates hustle to be heard.

It's hard to say when it happened exactly, but at some point around Halloween things started moving very quickly on the telecommunications front.

Suddenly, what was once a fanciful vision of the distant future -- when Americans would be able to communicate with their appliances via cell phone and carry on conversations with their loved ones via computer -- became as immediate as next season's sitcoms.

Things were already getting out of hand for those of us who had held onto record players during the ascendance of CDs, stubbornly refusing to invest in new consumer electronics "until things settle down." By the close of 1993, everything from pencils and postal carriers to Blockbuster and the Big Three networks began to look suspiciously out of date.

Meanwhile we were inundated with the details of the Viacom-QVC battle for Paramount -- or was it the other way around? -- as Bell Atlantic, a formerly reputable phone company, got hitched to cable behemoth TeleCommunications Inc. (TCI) in a $32 million ceremony. It was hard to know what to think, much less what to do, about all this merger mania beyond contemplating a future in which the number of info-phone-tainment-TV-companies-with-shopping-networks would be down to two.

As if all this weren't bad enough, computer hackers -- known in some circles as mouse potatoes -- got sex appeal. It was hard to keep dismissing people who whiled away their time at the keyboard (what -- didn't they have jobs? couldn't they get dates?) when their hero Bill Gates was the richest man in America. Gone were the days when the electronically challenged could feign politeness as discussions turned to modems, megabytes and ROMs vs. RAMS. Maybe most Americans would rather have lower monthly utility rates, safer schools and a new washing machine than a connection to global E-mail, but the Information Age had arrived, and the media brought the message forth in a tsunami of articles about the Internet, a loose network of computers that until recently was of concern only to science nerds, academics and computer junkies. Today, according to countless breathless accounts commissioned by editors clearly concerned about how all this may affect their profession, the number of Americans with access to the Internet is 15 million -- and climbing.

The lonely crowd's worst fears about the electronic frontier -- where citizens will be able to hook themselves up to a life-support system consisting of television, telephone and computer, and never have to leave the house in order to work, shop or even vote -- were about to become reality. And inevitably, in a town where the term policy wonk was invented, fascination with things electronic took hold like the latest strain of Asian flu. As Information Superhighway hysteria spread down Pennsylvania Avenue, you could almost hear humming in the air: It's the dawning of a new era in communications law! Don't miss this opportunity to participate in the latest policy debate! Say "goodbye" to old-fashioned representative democracy -- "hello" to Virtual Government!

Hey -- be the first person in your political coalition to host an Internet news group!

"When I started in 1990, there were damn few people working on this," says Jamie Love, who in three short years has established himself as Ralph Nader's telecommunications policy guru and Internet gadfly. Nowadays, when Love drops by meetings of public interest types who want to join in the telecommunications fun, there are so many Johnny Come Latelys he can barely find a chair.

Part of the attraction is the prospect of participating in a bleeding-edge campaign that has none of the baggage of such aging issues as saving the spotted owl, reforming federal prisons and making automobiles more energy efficient. The revolution in telecommunications is all new and it's all up for grabs.

And before long, a growing chorus of advocates says, it will be too late for the public interest community to try to influence telecommunications policy -- to make interactive TV channels available, for example, for democratic discourse and the like. Already, money from cable, broadcast, telephone, home shopping and Hollywood is pouring through Congress like Mississippi River floodwaters -- at the rate of about $10 million in 1991-92, according to one analysis. And the raw economic power of media chieftains like John Malone, the zillionaire co-founder of TCI, coupled with their dazzling appeal in a city better known for pushing paper than global vision, is threatening to turn policymakers into whimpering schoolchildren.

Still, if Wall Street barons are on the edges of their seats awaiting some signal from the marketplace about what Americans really want (video-porn delivered by phone? a hair-care channel?), Washington's public interest community is at a similar turning point. Many groups have heard the call. But it's one thing to have a passionate interest in telecommunications policy. It's another to develop a grassroots Information Superhighway lobbying group -- and raise enough money to keep it going.