Comments made by Shawn W. Yerxa, P-IHAC, at the Net95 panel discussion "Life After IHAC," June 22, 1995, Ottawa, Canada. The IHAC Recommendations: A Pre-emptive Strike--A Rare Opportunity Indeed! I call this a pre-emptive strike because it is not very often, particularly in the current political climate, that individuals and groups working for public interest goals gets a platform to speak, at least not inside. More often this mix of ideas would be expressed outside and be called a protest. I therefore want to thank Dave Sutherland, Leslie Regan Shade, and the rest of the organizers for putting this together. I also want to express why I think it is important for us, as public interest advocates, to speak to you, a group made up primarily of network administrators and facilitators. If you believe, as I do, that technologies represent a set of congealed social relations then the values which you people bring to your work will be reflected in our communication spaces of the future. In this sense you represent the front line of resistance. You can go out into your communities and see the hardship and struggle and bring that experience back to your workplace. This will bring with it tensions between the demands of your employment and your values, but I hope you can inculcate some of those values into your work. So, we are here to address the IHAC recommendations which we do not have. In the spring, when we were organizing this, we anticipated that the Advisory Council would be wrapped up and that we would have their recommendations. We don't. So, what to do? I believe that working from the partial list of recommendations disclosed in the minutes of the IHAC meetings, the general policy directions taken by the government, and the CRTC's work we can get a sense of where things are going. We do have the CRTC's report, "Competition and Culture on Canada's Information Highway,"[1] and it offered no surprises. No surprises other than the fact that CRTC did demonstrate its willingness to play patsy for the government by calling the convergence hearing a "public consultation." Does the CRTC's report reflect the public's concerns? No. Was the public consulted? No. The Advisory Council appears to have adopted the government's misguided assumptions: that consumers have replaced citizens and that competition and technology can cure our social problems. None of these assumptions are valid yet they are reflected in the Council's and the CRTC's work. The Council, early on, indicated its direction by deciding to protect the privacy of cellular phone calls by suggesting that it be a crime to intercept those radio transmissions. This flies directly against the history of our use of the radio spectrum as public property and sets a precedent for the privatization of that spectrum. Although, hardly unanticipated, after all, if industry is going to profit more from public goods you can't have them held in a public trust. Our traditional vehicle for the defence of cultural sovereignty, whether one believes it to be effective or not, has been undermined by the Council's recommendation for increased foreign ownership in broadcasting undertakings. The government has already raised the limits for foreign ownership in telecommunications and endorsed the use of non-Canadian satellites by Canadian broadcasters so I assume they are pleased. Hopefully, we can dispense with the now contradictory and tired rhetoric of cultural sovereignty, and clear the air a little. The Council has recommended more public funding and tax credits for research and development. I hope the corporations enjoy our support. I don't expect the children in our over crowded classrooms, the laid off health care workers, or the people who's drugs are no longer covered by the Ontario Health Insurance Plan will be very understanding of such corporate welfare scams. What can we expect in the final report from the IHAC? Worse. The IHAC, in its unpublished discussion paper on "consumer awareness"[1] asks "What is the appropriate role for business in enhancing consumer awareness?" "What is the appropriate role for the education system?" And, "[w]hat is the most effective way in which governments can contribute to consumer awareness and involvement?" When did business forget how to sell? When did our education system become a vehicle for advertising? Why is government being asked to subsidize the manufacture of infobahn consumers? Why are questions such as these being asked instead of more fundamental and important questions? Questions such as: what can the Infobahn do for us as a society? Will VOD, home banking, on-line betting, and value-added (read: expensive) information distribution generate jobs or reduce them? Will these services, having been identified as those most likely to succeed, provide a more positive social environment? Why is such a focus being placed on education and health? Is it perhaps because these areas represent large pools of "under-exploited" public subsidies for corporations in their rush to develop consumers and products? How many students per teacher do we have now? How many will we have after budgets are shifted to accommodate this technology? How can the myth be perpetuated that these sectors will be able to deliver services more "efficiently" using the infobahn, when the evidence suggests the opposite? Perhaps quality is no longer part of the equation. Perhaps the answers to these and other troubling questions can be found in the fact that neither "consumers" nor the public want these services in great enough numbers to justify them. In keeping with our elite policy making processes the dominant ethos suggests that we damn the evidence! The "people" should not stand in the way of "progress," there is money to be made! Sounds like "business" as usual. In conclusion, perhaps some good news. The consumers are not buying it! Just as Arthur and Marilouise Kroker in last week's Ctheory, referring to the movie Johnny Mnemonic, suggest that cyberpunk is dead. "Its failure is interesting less for aesthetic reasons - acting, screenplay, cinematography, special effects - than for what it says about the hyper-modern mind and its taste for shifting cultural signs. Killed by sheer cultural acceleration, by the fact that 80s cyberpunk metaphors don't really work anymore in the virtual 90s, the popular failure of Johnny Mnemonic testifies to the end of the charismatic phase of digital reality, and the beginning of the iron law of technological normalization".[3] As we told the CRTC in the spring, the information highway is headed for a dead end. Research presented to the Commission by the cable companies and telephone companies demonstrates massive consumer resistance to these "value-adding" services, the myths, and even the infobahn metaphors themselves. Hopefully this consumer resistance will hold the fort until we can have some substantive public debate of these fundamental and far reaching issues. Thank you. Shawn W. Yerxa aa435@FreeNet.Carleton.ca Co-coordinator, The Public--Information Highway Advisory Council ba439@FreeNet.Carleton.ca ------------------------------------ [1] CRTC. (1995). Competition and Culture on Canada's Information Highway: Managing the Realities of Transition. Hull, Que: CRTC. [2] IHAC. (1995). Consumer Awareness and Involvement on the Canadian Information Highway. Ottawa, Ont: Information Highway Advisory Council, Access and Social Impacts Working Group [obtained through an access to information request to Industry Canada]. [3] Kroker, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. (1995). "Event-Scene 17 - The Day Cyberpunk Died." Ctheory, ctheory@clyde.concordia.ca, Wed. June 14 23:11:13. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shawn W. Yerxa Ottawa, Canada swyerxa@ccs.carleton.ca -----------------------------------------------------------------------------