Staff Papers
Government and the Internet: Future Directions for Use and Infrastructure Support
Paper presented by Eric Wainwright, Deputy Director-General at the Electronic Commerce on the Internet Conference, Marina Mandarin Hotel, Singapore, 22-24 November 1995.
CONTENTS
- Introduction
- Public Policy
- Roles of Government
- Government Objectives
- Conclusion
- Appendix A: Recent / Current Aaustralian Inquiries
Introduction
In a conference entitled "Electronic Commerce and the Internet" it is inevitable that the focus of interest for those present will be on the Internet as a resource for effective commercial transactions and the extent to which it offers new opportunities for business. The role of governments in this process can often be somewhat remote to those involved in everyday commerce, particularly those involved in the smaller businesses that are taking to the Internet in such large numbers. In examining the potential involvement of government in the Internet, or rather, in the use of global wide-area networking capabilities, which is what the present Internet demonstrates, I shall be concentrating on the impacts on the commercial sector, but within a broader framework of potential government objectives in this area.
In practice, in a modern economy, government and the commercial sector have become increasingly linked and interdependent. In many countries of the world there has been a move to reduce the scope of direct government activity. But paradoxically, this move to smaller government has in fact tended to increase the total interactions between the public and private sectors, as governments increasingly outsource the provision of services and development activities previously conducted within public services. It is also the case that, in those countries which are experiencing a rapid move from subsistence agriculture-based economies to industrial and services- based economies, a substantial proportion of people are experiencing for the first time more direct transactions with government through contacts involving regulatory activities and various taxation and benefits transfers.
Public Policy
In any society where a government has neither the will nor the power to act in an authoritarian and arbitrary way, the existence of that government rests on acceptance of its validity and utility by its people. But what is government for? Here I make a number of assertions, which some may wish to question :
- The purpose of the government is to add value to the lives of the people it serves.
- Government policy and services will be if those making decisions
are better informed about :
- best practices
- the effects on those served. - Information as a public good : the more people have the greater the social benefit
- Governments should behave as if all information is open to the public, unless restricted for specific reasons of privacy or security.
One of the problems of modern democracy has been the development of balanced public policy. In many countries, and certainly in Australia, most ongoing public policy has had very little significant input to it from outside the relatively few active members of the governing political parties, senior business people, organised lobby groups and the public bureaucracy. The feedback that government obtains through the mass media generally has significant bias, and an ad hoc nature to it, as the mass media inevitably tread a careful line between communication and entertainment, with some penchant for the sensational, together with a wary eye on the views of both their proprietors and governments. The lobbying process is also generally unsatisfactory and biased.
I contrast this process with my experience on the Internet, where ideas and policy proposals can be posted at an early stage to a wide range of people, and through cross-posting to an open cross-section of interested individuals. Feedback is invariably sensible and helpful in building on the initial ideas, and if the nature of the process also attracts occasional diatribes or replies that are simply silly, this seems a small price to pay, and reflects the nature of the human condition.
It seems to me that for the first time we are beginning to have the technology available to link effectively governments and the people they serve. In the Internet, we have an open two-way interactive user-driven technology. This may mean that we can move beyond primarily representative government, to forms of government in which specific policies are more directly based on feedback and input from significant (and valid) cross-sections of the public. Interaction can be initiated not only by the government, simply as a provider of information, policy or educational opportunity to a passive public, but also by anyone with access to a networked work station and the sufficient skill to be able to use it. An interactive network is crucial in giving voice to everyone connected to it. It not only provides the power of the telephone to reach friends and colleagues anywhere in the world on a one-to-one basis, but provides everyone with a narrow cast publishing capability.
Roles of Government
In practice, a government has a number of roles.
This area is one of particular interest at the moment in most countries of the Australia-Pacific region. Most of our countries have had the situation of a monopoly (usually government-owned) telecommunications provider until relatively recently. As telecommunications capacity moves from being a scarce resource to one of general and possibly abundant availability, it is generally agreed that monopoly supply is not likely to lead to the most efficient long term operation, and hence lowest cost availability to the public. But in moving from a telephone monopoly situation to a competitive environment encompassing the full range of wired and wireless communication channels, there are significant difficulties of ensuring an optimum outcome in terms of the public interest. The solutions, which are different in each country, require a high degree of collaboration between governments and the private sector, to ensure an orderly roll out of broader bandwidth capacities which is both commercially viable, in terms of revenue generation, and also meets government objectives.
Influence and Leadership
While government can and in practice must take a regulatory role in relation to communications, governments can achieve at least as much, if not more, through their leadership and influence role. Singapore is perhaps the world's leading example of government vision through its intelligent island and IT 2000 strategies, and in particular in the extent to which the implementation of these strategies has been backed up by government-led actions across many areas. But Singapore is not alone in this. Governments around the world have come to realise the importance of a modern communication infrastructure if they are to achieve national, economic and social welfare objectives.
For example, in Australia, after a somewhat belated start, we now have an inter- locking structure of government decision making and advice (see Appendix A), following two major reports released early in 1995 - those of the Broadband Services Expert Group, and the Information Technology Review Group. Similar enquiries have been held and structures set up in countries as diverse as the United States, Canada, Denmark and South Korea. Nevertheless, getting the right balance of private and public sector investment remains a difficult task for all governments. Long term viable applications cannot be ensured by government investment alone, and governments have generally been relatively poor in selecting promising research and development that leads to commercial success.
But nevertheless, governments can set a climate in which commercial decisions are influenced, and this is as true of the Internet and the communications/information industries as with others - even though in countries such as Australia with federal systems, the influence of a government can be much less than in countries without states or provinces which control many of the national economic decisions. The challenge for each country is to shape the architecture of its national networks so that they meet not just short-term commercial objectives but also long-term societal needs.
Government Objectives
But why should government take special notice of the Internet? What does the Internet offer which is attractive to governments? The Internet clearly represents the beginning of a global intercommunication network through which all voice, data and multimedia will eventually travel. The key to its success is its continuing development or field tested standards which are gradually increasing the range of functionality and interoperability, so that more and more applications can be used remotely from anywhere across the world.
Why should this be important to government? The reasons are mainly two-fold :
The use of the Internet as a communication mechanism relies on the facts that :
- almost all textual documents, and a rapidly increasing percentage of multimedia objects such as moving pictures and sound recordings, are now initially created in digital form;
- once the communication infrastructure is in place, the cost of transmitting any document anywhere in a country or around the world is tending towards zero;
- Much communication results in interaction and manipulation of documents - any system which enables remote manipulation without recreation of the original is likely to result in considerable cost savings.
This efficiency of government issue is certainly one which has been exercising our minds in the Australian government, and no doubt this is true in other governments. To quote the United States' study on electronic delivery of government services "access to government is uncoordinated, cumbersome, complex, slow and confusing". Government has become increasingly complex, and some lack of trust in government in many countries can, I believe, be put down to this complexity. Traditional government bureaucracies have been organised for the purposes of efficient policy development and programme delivery in particular areas - that is, vertically, with each agency concentrating on its particular area, such as education, health, legal services or social security. Each department tends to have its own channels for distribution to the public. But with the growth of the Internet, there is a need for government to reconceptualise its approach, recognising that as communication capabilities spread to local community access points and homes, and across government itself, there is an urgent need to enable individuals, business and government itself to obtain efficient interaction from a single remote location to wherever in government is most appropriate to meet the requirement of the moment. It should not be up to an individual or even a commercial organisation to understand the complex structure of government agencies and programmes, but for the government to organise its electronic access system so that it permits the effective flow of information and conduct of transactions between :
- government and individuals;
- government and business;
- one agency of government and another.
In Australia, we do not yet have even electronic mail across all government departments, let alone World Wide Web access to government documents and data bases. The number of interactions between the commercial sector and government is rising all the time, for reasons associated with taxation, government procurement, government incentives, research and development grants and many other factors. As in many ways information is becoming the business of both government and the commercial sector, as we move into information intensive economies, the efficiency of the interactions between government and its individual and corporate clients becomes a matter of national importance.
But the efficiency of government relates not only to transaction efficiencies. Governments are major collectors and creators of information on behalf of the public. Traditionally, a very large part of the information within government has not been available outside government, indeed often not outside the particular agency, or even section of an agency, responsible for its collection or creation. Almost all government documents and databases are now created in electronic form in the first place. Once an effective access infrastructure is in place, in the form of Internet connections to and from each government agency, the marginal cost of making that information publicly available is very small. While of course some government information needs to be restricted for reasons of privacy, national security or occasionally a special commercial advantage, that is no reason to restrict access to the vast bulk of government information, collected at public expense. As I have said above, once Internet connections are in place, it is reasonable to expect a government to behave as if all information is open to the public unless restricted for specific reasons of privacy or security.
Certainly there is a very significant amount of government information which could be available for useful analysis to the benefit of the private sector. For government information to be usable conveniently and easily will require most governments to think very carefully how related information created in different departments and agencies can be presented effectively, and a whole of government approach will be needed to the development of good resource discovery and retrieval mechanisms through the adoption of common standards. Government must have a leadership role in the promotion of standards which make information retrieval and government/business transactions as transparent and seamless as possible. Proof of concept pilots supported by both government and the commercial sector across a range of commercial applications are needed for this to occur.
Until relatively recently, relative geographic advantage/disadvantage has been a significant factor in determining commercial success - the more remote customers are from the source of product and supply, the harder it is for the supplier to compete with other closer sources of supply. In the case of governments, delivery of services to people in smaller and more remote communities, in areas such as health, education and social welfare, has been costly compared with delivery in areas of dense population. But a national interoperable communications system, once in place, enables many services to be delivered to remote areas as cheaply as elsewhere.
For many governments, this market reach issue is seen as a totally different one, that of equity, ie, that all citizens are entitled to have a similar standard of access to essential services. In Australia, in the past, this "community service obligation" has been interpreted to mean basic telephone access. Now there is much deliberation as to whether this concept needs to be extended to include Internet access, and the Australian federal government has a whole series of initiatives in train to enable schools, public libraries, community centres, and other community organisations all to be connected within a very short time frame.
Governments equity objectives for their people are thus essentially the same as those of commercial organisations. Both are highly dependent on communications reach. If governments are to deliver services efficiently, and their citizens are to transact with government efficiently, Internet reach is required. Likewise for commercial organisations attempting to advertise, market services and enable efficient retail transactions. (The fact that neither government nor the commercial sector yet knows how to interact successfully with their clients over the Internet is another issue - but one which is the subject of most other papers at this Conference). This interdependence of government and commercial objectives means that there are a number of national objectives which could be met through greater Internet access, and the development of the necessary associated skills and applications. These include :
The Internet not only extends market reach nationally, but also globally. This makes all our businesses valuable to external competition. Local monopolies are likely to become a thing of the past, when even small businesses situated anywhere in the world can sell directly into our markets. The balance of import and export is likely to be affected very strongly by Internet-based marketing, and unless our commercial sector is able to use the Internet effectively to market world-wide, local businesses are likely to suffer from external competition.
But the Internet also presents a wonderful source of current information of useful competitive intelligence and assessment of world best practices. In my own field, I simply could not keep up with the pace of advance in research and development without continual use of the Internet. Increasingly that is becoming true in every field - not only for the academic and research communities for whom the Internet was initially built, but for the whole of the commercial sector.
The Internet has also become the driver of the information and communication industries, for the same reasons referred to above - market reach. Unless software and hardware allows the applications running on them to be run remotely over the Internet, there is little chance of them now becoming widely used. The sheer size and vitality of the telecommunications, information services and information technology industries now mean that overall national competitiveness is likely to hinge on all our countries being amongst the world's leaders in research, development and innovative applications.
Rural and Employment Stimulation
But in many countries, certainly in Australia, and I believe most in Asia, the problem of rural stimulation is a real one. How do we prevent the economic and social costs of the continuing drift to the cities? Extending Internet-type services offers the potential for business and government in rural areas to offer a similar level of capability as in urban areas. For government this includes the cost associated with health and education, but there are many quality of life factors affecting groups like the disabled. If the disadvantages of distance are reduced through external communications, then perhaps the cost advantage of cheaper land in rural areas may actually allow some kinds of business to have a competitive advantage from outside city areas. There can be no conclusion on this issue at present, but it is certainly arguable that the apparently expensive extension of the Internet into rural areas at present represents a very sensible national strategy when total infrastructure costs are taken into account. Teleworking via the Internet may well be significantly cheaper for society as a whole than forcing workers to travel over ever larger distances into city locations for work purposes.
Conclusion
So what does all this mean? Where should government be putting its efforts to ensure that the potential benefits of the Internet are achieved? The answers may vary from country to country. In Singapore, where the costs of the physical infrastructure investments are relatively small compared with a country like Australia, and where the combination of a strong central government and compact population allow a high measure of government leadership in relation to national investment patterns, then the country's concentration on rapid physical roll out to the population, combined with strong programmes of public motivation and training, together with the development of middleware, serving a wide range of applications, seems a very sensible strategy. In Australia, with more decentralised decision making, and some suspicion of government objectives in any area in which matters of privacy, security and community standards are at issue, then high priority issues for the present include :
- Equity of rural services.
- Efficiency of transactions across three levels of government.
One area which I suspect remains relatively overlooked in all countries is the development of effective resource discovery and retrieval systems. At the moment, many government agencies and commercial organisations are only in the very early stages of Internet use, with only relatively small amounts of information behind their interfaces with the Internet. But already the problem of finding information and required services is difficult - yet in five years at present growth rates there will be more than 100 times as much material on the Internet. Effective marketing requires customers to find our services before they use them. The Internet gives consumers considerably increased power. Because Internet use is user generated and controlled, rather than clients being passive recipients of broadcast advertising, successful companies and governments are going to have to develop very effective means for people to find and then want to use their services. It is as yet unknown whether finding aids are commercially viable, or an overhead which has to be borne by the underlying services retrieved. If they are commercially viable, is the advertising supported model or the user pays models likely to be more successful? Most of the present heavily used search engines are free - indeed it is becoming expected that all World Wide Web sites can offer a local search engine service across all the electronic information behind them. It will be interesting to see the progress of commercial finding services such as Infoseek.
To conclude, I believe the Internet will prove to be the most important technological development of the late 20th century. Both governments and the commercial sectors in all our countries are likely to be highly dependent on its effective development over the next few years. This congruence of objectives makes it essential therefore for there to be close collaboration between sectors to ensure that the objectives of both can be met without wasted infrastructure investment and unnecessary competition. This is no time to be repeating the telegraph wars and the varying rail gauges of the 19th and early 20th century.
Appendix A: Recent / Current Aaustralian Inquiries
General Plans
- ASTEC Surf's Up : Alternative Futures for Full Service Networks in Australia. A Foresighting Study : Information and Communications Technology 2010. Report released November 1995.
- ASTEC. Australia's Science and Engineering base for Development of Australia's Information and Communications Services and Technologies. Report released December 1995.
- ASTEC Study of Australia's Requirements for Research Data Networks. The Networked Nation. Report released October 1994.
- Broadband Services Expert Group. Networking Australia's Future. Final report released February 1995.
- Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics. Communications Futures Study. Final report released June 1995.
- DCA. Information and Communications Services and Technologies. National Strategy Statement, 5 December 1995.
- DSS. Request for Information : National Community Information Network. Released July 1995.
- House of Representatives Standing Committee for Long Term Strategies. The Workforce of the Future. Report released June 1995.
- Industry Commission. Computer Hardware Software. Final report released September 1995.
- National Board of Employment, Education and Training (NBEET) Employment and Skills Formation Council. Converging Technology Work and Learning. Report released November 1995.
Content Issues
- Attorney-General and Minister for Communications and the Arts. Consultation on the regulation of online information services. Issues Paper issued July 1995.
- Australian Broadcasting Authority. Investigation into the content of online services. Issues Paper released December 1995.
- Copyright Convergence Group. Highways to Change : Copyright in the New Communications Environment. Report released August 1994.
- Copyright Law Review Committee. Inquiry into the Copyright Act. Issues Paper to be released early 1996; Report relating to Categories of Protected Subject Matters expected February 1996, Final Report by November 1997.
- National Board for Employment, Education and Training (NBEET) Schools Council. Management of Student Access to Controversial material on the Internet. Report expected March 1996.
- Senate Select Committee on Community Standards Relevant to the Supply of Services using Electronic Technologies. Report on regulation of computer online services. Part 1, September 1995; Part 2, November 1995.
Government Services
- DAS. Electronic Commerce : Commonwealth Government Statement of Direction. Report released April 1995.
- Information Technology Review Group. Clients First : The Challenge for Government Information Technology. Report released March 1995.
- Office of Government Information Technology. Framework and Strategies for Information Technology in the Commonwealth of Australia. Public draft released January 1996.
Multimedia / Open Learning
- 'Creative Nation' Commonwealth Cultural Policy Statement released October 1994.
- DEET. Education Network Australia : Business Requirements Analysis. October 1995.
- Senate Employment, Education and Training References Committee. Inquiry into the Development of Open Learning in Australia. Reports released : December 1994, March 1995.
Telecommunications Policy
- Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics. Telecommunications in Australia. Report released February 1995.
- Senate Economics References Committee. Connecting You Now - Telecommunications Developments Towards the Year 2000. Report released November 1995.
- Standards Australia. Interim Exposure Report of the Digital Video Services Task Group released July 1995.
- Telecommunications Policy Review. Beyond the Duopoly. Issues Paper released October 1994, some Cabinet Decisions announced August 1995, new legislation Exposure Draft released December 1995.
Eric Wainwright, Deputy Director-General
February 1996.
