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.cb Comments on Licklider's paper.

	Licklider is right that the new technologies of computers,
communication and databases provide great opportunities to improve
government and its interaction with other institutions and with
individuals.  He wants to bring this about through a government organized
%2Multinet%1 combining communication, data bases, transaction monitoring,
and computation capability.  Unfortunately, the %2Multinet%1 plan seems to
miss major possibilities for benefitting citizens, and the proposals
for achieving it overemphasize the role of government, create unnecessary
and harmful monopolies, and stifle individual and business initiative.  I
also disagree with some of its technological judgments.
I agree that progress requires some standardization on various
communication protocols, but I think it is necessary to be precise
about what should be standardized and the extent to which standards
should be laws.

	Licklider envisages government as embodying the collective wisdom
of society and setting up institutions and laws that once %2"cast into both
legislation and software, ... may come to be regarded the same way as
physical laws are regarded now: irresistable, inviolable, inescapable,
part of nature, invariably enforced, not the kind of thing one complains
about"%1.  For good or ill, government plays quite a different role in
every society in the world.  Manipulating law and its interpretation is
the main means of struggle for group advantage and a major means of individual
struggle for power and prestige.  For this reason government law is
unlikely to resemble natural law in impartiality and constancy in the
forseeable future.

	A consumer is better served when manufacturers compete directly
for his dollar than when their lawyers compee for the favor of politicians
regulators or judges acting on the consumer's behalf.  Unfortunately, some
commodities are natural monopolies and regulation is required.  When
a complex of new technologies becomes available, it is important to
distinguish what are the natural monopolies and what can be provided
by competing servers.  The %2Multinet%1 proposal lumps both together.

	In my opionion communication of signals will remain a natural monopoly
except that the FCC is on the right track in stimulating competition
in devices connected to the communication network.
Moreover the operation of a particular database such as a national
library, the airline guide or the national telephone directory
seems to be a natural monopoly although different databases can
have different proprietors, and methods of accessing the database
can sometimes compete.  Other than that, it seems to me that
computation services and so-called value-added communication is
not a natural monopoly, and policy makers ought to try to ensure
that it remains competitive.

	The experience of our society is that when a service can be provided
by manufacturers competing for a customer's dollar, the result is more
satisfactory than when the service has to be provided by a monopoly
whether governmental or private.
Unfortunately, defense and the telephone network are natural monopolies
that must be operated or regulated by the government.  The %2Multinet%1
proposals lead to monopoly in two ways:  They combine naturally
monopolistic communication with naturally competitive data-processing, and
they arrogate to government decisions about what services will best serve
the citizen in cases where the citizen can serve as the best judge of his
own welfare by deciding what to buy.

	Here are some detailed comments:

	#. The stated assumption about programation that %2"unless it is
wisely planned and well executed, it will be disastrous in the long run"%1
is unsupported by any example of what bad things will happen if
data-processing and communication continue unplanned.  To be a bit rude,
it sounds like self-serving nonsense on behalf of the "public policy
community" and people who want the authority to regulate.  Certainly
Licklider's scenario 1 can't be called a disaster.  It just depicts some
opportunities missed if the government doesn't take them.  Since
co-ordination requires the authority to forbid independent initiative in
the area to be co-ordinated, statements that co-ordination is required
must be very well justified.

	I suppose the statement, %2"recognizing the potential
significance of computer communication, the government organizes
all the capabilities of the society to develop and exploit networking
in socially as well as economically productive dimensions%1 is not
intended to be taken literally.  No-one has shown that networking
has potentials justifying government powers that were hardly
asserted even during World War II.  Licklider should say precisely
what powers he wants the government to have, making explicit
the cost to society of giving the goverment such power.

	#. Packet switching is a worthwhile technology and ARPA
deserves much credit for developing it, but ARPA's natural tendency
to overestimate what it has sponsored has led to a neglect
possibilities of using the already ubiquitous dial network.
Elsewhere I have proposed that much useful computer-computer
communication, including messages, file transfer and login
capabilities of ARPAnet can be achieved for a few thousand dollars
capital cost if ARPAnet like protocols for using a telephone
dialer are developed.  This proposal is called %2Dialnet%1.

    In particular, electronic mail among individuals and businesses
requires no new network at all to be cost-effective.  A micro-computer and
terminal that dialed the recipient's similar terminal can be marketed today
at less than $1500, and the cost of the telephone call is already less
than that of a letter and the cost of a coast-to-coast call after 11pm is
21 cents.  If the Postal Service achieves its goal of a 35 cent charge by
1985 for a first class letter, they will be wiped out by $500 terminals.
Of course it may happen that through the wonders of government planning,
individuals will be forbidden to communicate in this way.

	#. We have in Scenario 2, %2"The Multinet has supplanted the
postal system for letters, the dial telephone system for conversations
and teleconferences, stand-alone batch processing and time-sharing
systems for computation, and most filing cabinets, microfilm repositories,
document rooms, an libraries for information storage and retrieval%1.
All these services are desirable, but it is not desirable that they
be under unified management.  The communication aspects may continue
to be natural monopolies, the filing systems certainly should be
products supplied by competing vendors.  Computing services are
naturally competitive.  There may be, however, a new kind of natural
monopoly - maintenance of single integrated public databases like
telephone directories, the national address directory, and perhaps
a single library with all books.  These may require regulation of
the prices they can charge.

	#. Some activities, like telephone communication, are natural
monopolies, and others, like providing computation services, are not.
Experience seems to show that when an activity is a natural monopoly,
it is better operated as a private monopoly regulated by the government.
Government monopoly is worse and so is a government regulated cartel
(like the airlines or interstate commerce).  The reason why the latter
two work out badly is again political struggle for advantage rewarding
the best lawyers and the best politicians.

	Licklider's proposals mix activities that are natural monopolies
with activities that aren't.  I think we should avoid at all costs
creating monopolies that combine communication and computation, e.g.
the %2New York Times%1 proposal to give electronic mail to the Postal
Service.

	Therefore I favor the FCC decisions permitting interconnection
of devices and services to the telephone network, but worry about
the specialized carriers that are beginning to demand that the FCC
create a cartel for their benefit.

	#. The article overemphasizes the importance of technologies
with which Licklider has been associated - especially packet switching.
Almost everything that is presently done with the ARPA net could
be done with suitable protocols using the present dial-up telephone
net.  It would be more expensive only in very high traffic situations.
I call the proposal for protocols that will allow
a program in any computer to dial a program in any other and
communicate with it %2Dialnet%1.

	#. The article overemphasizes the importance of secrecy and
privacy and exaggerates the possibilities for crime and other
misbehavior that inadequacies create.

	#. The largest interaction of computers and government
	#. The greatest opportunities for improvement in government
that computers permit is to make government more accessible to
citizens.  Here are some proposals in that direction:

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		&. Every government document that is required by
the %2Freedom of Information Act%1 to be publically accessible
should be kept in computer files accessible nationwide by telephone.
This includes the Federal Register, the Congressional Record, the
files on the status of bills now kept by Congress in computers,
court decisions and the status of court cases, environmental
impact statements, and other rationalizations of government decisions
and regulations.  Even now there are enough computer terminals
so that such a practice would take a lot of the mystery out of
government.

		&. This next is harder.  Every policy generating
and regulation generating organization should keep active a
question answering program about the content and rationale of
its policies.  The object is to answer automatically those questions
that can be answered automatically and therefore make the policy
makers more accessible to people with questions that can't be
so answered.  Each person responsible for policies should spend
a few percent of his time dealing with the questions not answered
automatically.  %2The ultimate goal would be that a person confronted
with a regulation whose literal application is unjust in his
particular case should always be able to reach a person with
the authority to make an exception.%1  The full achievement of
this goal will require major advances in artificial intelligence.