The evolution of the global network must be guided, not ignored

NEWSPAPERS reported recently that the Oxford English Dictionary — the authoritative 1,100-page tome — is thinking of discontinuing its print edition. People still look up the meaning of words, but the vast majority now eschew the print version in favor of the Web.

Information has fallen victim to digital technology, making it essential that we create new rules of the road to preserve the flow of all kinds of information — news, sports, weather, data — across the global network.

In many ways, globalism is an outgrowth of digital culture. In the analog days, we produced much more of the goods and services in America and we consumed them at home. Global markets and electronic trading depend on computers and sophisticated digital records of stock trades. Tracking systems for the physical shipment of parcels would not be possible without wireless devices, linked to back-end operation centers.

Telephony now depends on rapid packet switching. E-mail is a creature of the digital age, circulated by ever-evolving routers. Without digital technology, globalism would be stuck in the 1960s and characterized by jet airplanes, satellites and trunk lines across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

When it works well, globalism is all about efficiency, using the right people to produce the right goods and deliver them to the right set of consumers. When it works poorly, globalism encourages a "race to the bottom," sacrificing both labor protections and environmental standards in a relentless drive to produce goods that are cheaper and cheaper to sell in markets located continents apart from the source.

Yet Globalism shares something in common with digital technology: Both trends are moving in one direction at an accelerating pace. Despite sporadic trade wars and high tariffs, global markets find a way to produce cheap goods for willing purchasers, just as digital software finds its way into the hands of those who want to make use of it.

Globalism existed for centuries before analog technology came onto the scene and was simply called "world trade," but goods and services and people moved at a slower pace. Letters and packages moved by steamship, then jets. To communicate from New York to London, one used a telephone trunk line that ran through a vast cable on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Due to its cost, international telephone calling was regarded as somewhat exotic, a service reserved for financiers, diplomats and elite members of the business class.

Information networks existed on computerized devices and were housed on mainframe computers, but these data centers were not portable and could not "talk" to each other unless dedicated lines were run between them.

All of this changed when digital technology replaced analog devices and the world, as a result, became very small, with distances between people abbreviated to milliseconds and the shipment of goods and services over long distances facilitated by sophisticated airborne shipping operations that relied on a wide array of data centers and mobile tracking devices.

Apart from commerce, digital technology also changed the way we perceived world events, bringing us an abundance of live video images and news crawls, but less perspective and analysis. It takes journalism, not live satellite feeds, for Americans to make wise decisions about when to invade countries and when to end conflict.

Which brings us to the debate over net neutrality and the prospect that the information superhighway over which we receive data will one day be governed by private rules that favor certain vendors. Clearly, there's a public interest in ensuring that all media creators have equal access to reaching consumers — whether over the Internet, Wi-Fi, or wireless networks built by mobile carriers, such as AT&T, Sprint and Verizon.

In the absence of the principle of equal access, thousands of virtual toll roads will be created, making consumers pay higher fees for access to certain categories of data over certain kinds of networks. While these rules might seem neutral on their face, the reality is that consumers will gravitate toward "free" and "cheap data," thereby favoring the news providers that have cut deals to get favored access to consumers.

As communications technologies continue to evolve, with hundreds of millions of people gaining access to the global network over the next decade, the way America runs its data networks will only increase in importance. In the analog world of copper telephone wires, we took the notion of a common carrier for granted. We also could access radio and television for free, by tuning in to the broadcast airwaves.

Today, voice communication and media programming share the same distribution channels, once dominated by the land-based Web but increasingly moving to wireless networks. We ignore the debate over how to govern this complex and expanding communication system at our peril.