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Tora Bikson
interviewed by Brian Hecht on 5 December, 1995
"It is critical that electronic mail be a basic service."
"Universal Access to Email", a landmark study just published by Rand, has received considerable attention this week from The New York Times, National Public Radio, and others. Tora Bikson is a co-author of the study, and is also a senior scientist at Rand.
Tripod: Your study talks a lot about the importance of "universal access" to email. There are lots of things that people do or don't have universal access to. Why, exactly, is this important?
TB: What we're arguing there is that email is not like a commodity or a gadget, where we've grown to expect socio-economic stratification among owners of, say, hi-tech electronic things. Rather, we're saying that it's much much more like a means for accessing information, communicating and exchanging ideas, voluntary associations, civic organizations, political activity and, eventually, economic advantage. So it's really quite a means, and if people are cut off from the means to participate in these kinds of activities, it really has a negative impact on society as a whole. Conversely, if people are able to engage in these activities, you would expect considerable benefits, not the least of which are economic advantages, through organizations -- and government services as well, by the way -- that want to move some of their efforts on-line and get rid of the paper processing.
Tripod: So it's more like access to roads or to public transportation...
TB: Yes. Right, it's more like that than getting a fancy car. That's what we don't like about the "two cars in every garage" metaphor. It's like, "A driveway and an on-ramp, please, to the National Information Infrastructure."
Tripod: What are some of the factors which are currently hindering access to email?
TB: One big one is cost. Even school systems that were polled as to whether they would like to use the Internet and on-line access to library materials as part of their educational materials -- they just can't afford it. And this is true, also, in many cases for individuals in the bottom quartile, particularly, in income distribution in the United States. They're having significant difficulties taking advantage of any of these opportunities.
Other barriers, of course, are education and training. Even in large businesses with well-educated employees, it's been shown to be disastrous to simply throw these technologies at them without providing a lot of specific training as to what it can be used for and how -- and then providing technical support and follow-up.
Tripod: How would you see it working? What would a national email infrastructure with universal access look like?
TB: We envision that it involves, first of all, a number of access devices, not any one particular kind. The picture that people tend to have in their mind is of a high-end PC at home, and that probably is ideal. But as you know a number of companies have announced that they're coming out with cheap network access devices. I think Oracle and Sun are among them. The idea being that you don't have to have a whole hard disk memory, and a lot of purchased and installed software -- you should be able to have just a network access device that, fairly straightforwardly, helps us select whatever software you need to get what you want to get at and rent it to you for a short period of time. Now this, of course, would shift costs from device to service, and it's not clear how that would play out.
A number of organizations now have announced that they're recycling PC's, upgrading them, and making them usable as good Internet access devices for schools and lower income families. And then, of course, there's a range of efforts going on to put PCs or other access devices in public areas like libraries, schools, churches, places of work, even hotel lobbies like public telephones. So we're hoping that a range of locations and range of access devices will beome available and what we're encouraging is thatincentives be provided to businesses to make these things happen.
Tripod: And you've pointed out that there's not really any government involvement in providing universal access...
TB: Except email addresses. We think it's important that everybody should have a default address. On the Internet, you sort of get a default address once you get an account ... But for anyone to be able to walk up and use a public access terminal, that person needs to have an address and an account and needs to be able to address others. We also think there's a role in the government making sure that there's a level regulatory playing field for the various kinds of industries that might become involved. So that, for example, no one type of firm would have an inherent regulatory advantage over another. It shouldn't be that it's easy for telephone services to get into this market, but not easy for cable television providers to get into the market. The view is to make the market open to a number of different vendors, and we're seeing already these various providers competing in each other's markets ...
Tripod: Now, you've mentioned the possibility of an email tax. How would that work?
TB: Despite all of the options the report considers, it looks as if there's no way that, say the bottom 10 percent of the U.S. households wouldn't need some sort of subsidy. We think that, probably, it would be worth targeting very carefully so that subsidies are dispensed without forethought and planning. Out assumption is that it takes the form of a voucher of some sort so that the recipient can choose among offerings on the market, those that are best suited, cheapest, whatever. Two options we recommend are either funding this from the general U.S. tax revenues, or funding them specifically from taxes on revenue specifically derived from information and telecommunications commercial services.
Tripod: Is email really a necessity of democracy and society in the 90s? Or is there an equally likely future without email?
TB: I think, first of all, casting it as if democracy were the only issue is casting it too narrow. But it does appear to us that more and more opportunities for voluntary associations, civic associations, political activity, are moving to this medium. So it might not be an absolute necessity, but it seems quite likely that anybody that is systematically excluded from these options is going to have quite a lot harder time feeling like a part of American society.
Tripod: You use email as the basic entry point for the information superhighway, whatever. But how important is it going to be that people have, say, Web access?
TB: That's one issue -- I think we mention it in the last chapter -- we notice, for example, that services like LatinoNet have a plain ascii homepage because, that way, you can get at it by a regular old gopher procedure. I think the trade-off is between deciding whether everybody can get along with a low-end machine, but it takes quite a lot more in training and help support -- or deciding it actually would mean money ahead in the end, if you make a friendly graphical interface that requires less training and help support.
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