Global Information Summit 2001

February 27 -

Net Conference

From: Lewis M. Branscomb 2/27/01 1:17

[58] Roles of private sector and governments

It seems to me the problem with the Minitel example of public policy to accelerate adoption of a new technology is that France tried to achieve two objectives with one strategy, and they proved somewhat incompatible. One objective was to introduce 5 million households to a digital networking by offering one, simple and useful application: an electronic phone book. The other objective was to establish a standard to ensure interoperability at least within France.

Both objectives were achieved by giving away 5 million units of the hardware. The consequence was to lock in an architecture and protocols that would not survive world usage and perhaps to fail to give as much attention to application development as to the simple capabilitiy of sending messages and looking up phone numbers.

Nevertheless, I do admire the audacity of France Telecom in moving ahead so aggressively, but I think it retrospect a more general purpose device architecture with the possibility of introducing TCP/IP as an early alternative would have gotton France further down the road more quickly.

The basic policy issue is: what is the better role for government: (a)

creating technology options that enable markets or (b) choosing and creating markets that drive the technology? Clearly the US preference is for (a) alone, and Europe tends to believe that (b) is also an important role for government.

From: Moderator - Masanobu Katoh 3/6/01 1:40

[59] Comment from Moderator - Masanobu Katoh

It has already been one month since we started this net conference. We covered a variety of issues, and your Japanese audiences (including me) learned many things.

At the beginning, we focused on challenges to build the Ubiquitous Network. These challenges included a series of policy issues such as privacy and personal data protection, security, authentication, antitrust, copyright and other intellectual property protection. We also discussed a more broader theme of governance structure including the allocation of IP addresses and review of Internet domain name system. Of course, we thought the technology is one of the key factors for UbNs and we went through many technology/policy issues such as broadband connection, interoperability, reliability as well as specific technologies including i-mode and wireless LAN cards.

In his recent comment, Prof. Branscomb pointed out the importance of institutional, organizational, and even cultural factors. [56] Living in a multicultural environment, I fully agree to this point.

In order to build an UbNs, I think that we need to work on at least five areas of challenges: (1) physical infrastructure backed by financial resources; (2) technology; (3) (life-long) education; (4) legal framework including deregulation; and (5) culture.

The last element is especially important when we talk about "globally" UbNs. In some other societies, the relationship between government and private sector is very different from those in the US. And that is the reason why we have to consider if a certain model in some society works in another society. This question itself may be contradictory to the concept of UbNs. However, for instance, if we discuss the roles for the governments, the view toward and expectation for governments are different in different societies.

For instance, in the Japanese Net Conference, there was a comment saying that "When we are promoting Japanese technology to the world, we have a role for the government, because any one company cannot achieve this goal." Of course, there are many Japanese (including me) who have different views on this, but this was a symbolic point. In Japan, there are still some (or many) people who believe that the government needs to lead (regulate) many areas.

At this point of the Net Conference, I am supposed to summarize the discussions. However, instead of ruining your valuable comments, I want to suggest to continue this Conference for a while.

I thought that the discussions we had during the last month was very informative and lively, and I am wondering if we can have ongoing discussion of this kind in the future, too. I want to have a forum where Japanese and non-Japanese participants can exchange views. If Japanese participants can explain what is happening in Japan and non-Japanese participants can comment on these develoments, we can have a more interesting communication.

For example, in Japan, new initiative called "e-Japan" was just announced. (http://www1.kantei.go.jp/jp/it/network/dai2/2gijisidai.html) This is from a government-private sector committee consisting of the Prime Minister and Cabinet Members as well as private sector experts. They plan to make Japan as one of the world leaders in IT by the year 2005, and for this purpose, they propose to (1) build a world class information network, (2) promote human resources and education, (3) promote e commerce, and (4) expand eGovernment. I am very curious if initiatives like this make sense or not. In the Japanese (Nikkei Net) Conference, there are some criticism already saying that there are too much influences by the government's bureaucrats on this proposal. Unfortunately, the website is prepared only in Japanese now, but if we continue this (Nikkei Net) Conference, some Japanese participants can introduce this in English.

Non-Japanese participants can do the same thing to Japanese participants by introducing something new for Japanese.

We can of course make this more global.

From: Moderator - Masanobu Katoh

[60] e-Japan Web Sites

You can find the January 22nd version (basic strategy) of the e-Japan project in the following sites.

Summary: http://www.kantei.go.jp/foreign/it/network/0122summary.html
Strategy: http://www.kantei.go.jp/foreign/it/network/0122full_e.html

They are discussing details based on this, and the Japanese website I posted yesterday was the report of the discussions (in Japanese).

From: Sadahiko Kano

[61] more power to local governments

[59]Masanobu Katoh
In Japan, there are still some (or many) peoplewho believe that the government needs to lead (regulate) many areas.

Here, what the word "government" means for some (or many) Japanese people is the central government and never local governments such as prefectural governments.

I believe at a time when the goal was clear (to mass-produce products at competitive prices with good qualities), a central strong leadership in the form of regulation (in its good sense of the word) was helpful. But when we are chasing moving targets and there are so many uncertainties as is the case now, it would be better and wiser to encourage a variety of different approaches and resulting products and services, so that one or at least a few of them may survive in a new environment (survival of the fittest).

This has already started in the private sector in the form of splitting big corporations into smaller companies, each pursuing its own goal at its own risk. However, on the government side, at least in Japan, it seems that the central government is still trying to set the direction. I believe the time is coming now to give more power to local governments and to let them decide their goals and approaches by themselves to compete for their survival. By giving more power, I mean, giving more money, for example, through a tax reformation to let local governments be the initial recipients of consumption tax.

Just as in smaller autonomous companies it is easier to unleash the creativity and talents of its employees, so in local governments it would be easier to unleash the creativity and talents in them to develop their respective local areas.

From: Elliot E. Maxwell

[62] Role of Government

A recurring thread in the discussions is the role of government in bringing about ubiquitous networks. The view of the US has been contrasted with that of Europe and Japan, with the former characterized as being oriented toward supporting technology development that helps create markets and the latter seeking to nurture markets that drive technology development.

As someone deeply involved in US e-commerce policy over the last 6 years, I want to point to US government actions that seem to fall into the latter category. I'm thinking particularly of support for e-government. With rules that provide for governmental use of electronic signatures, electronic procurement, for Internet disclosure of massive amount of government information searchable via a customized search engine, and for increasing numbers of electronic transactions, the U.S. government hoped to advance citizen utilization of the Internet. These efforts were aimed at making government more efficient but also at demonstrating real benefits for citizens as Bruce McConnell put it. My own view is that governments all over the world can stimulate network development and provide better services to their citizens by moving in a similar direction; in many countries the role of the government is much greater than in the U.S. and this makes this path even more important.

In the same way, I believe that every overnment should be onsidering how to use these technologies in the provision of governmental goods and services. Much of the most innovative work in the U.S. has been supported by what is now the Technology Opportunity Program in the Deparment of Commerce but it might be worth considering small programs in every major government department that would support innovative uses of the technology in fulfilling the department's program responsibilities be they providing health care, education, job training,agricultural development etc.

Governments also will make policy decisions that can encourage or discourage Internet expansion. My own view is that government policies should be aimed at encouraging and enabling, or at the very minimum, not discouraging the extension of networks. Similarly governments should be reluctant to adopt policies based on the future development of a particular technology. I think Tony Rutkowski's words on openness are important here--and the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee has issued a stimulating report in this area.

The same institutional and cultural barriers that Lewis Branscomb pointed out as limiting the rate of adoption in individual firms also affect the ability of governments to work collaboratively in the policy arena. With this in mind I would argue that we should avoid calls for harmonization of Internet policies that are bound to differ due to different legal, historical and cultural traditions, but we should seek to achieve in our policies the interoperability that characterizes the Internet itself.

One particular area of policymaking deserves close attention on this score. We are beginning to see increased extraterritorial actions by governments such as in the recent Yahoo! case in France. I think we need to think carefully about the effect of this action and others to determine their impact on Internet development and on the ability of users to connect to other users and to sources of information.

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