At the same time the Advisory Council teemed with people from such library-like outfits as CBS, Black Entertainment Television, and Walt Disney. Bill Clinton’s people also let the movie industry’s premier lobbyist sit on the council—Jack Valenti, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson; yes, the same Valenti who had made history years ago by sleeping better at night because, he said, LBJ was in the White House. To the Council, too, went powerful telephone executives, a man from Microsoft, and John Scully, the former Apple executive who had been a Clinton stalwart in ’92. A co-chair was a Clinton supporter named Ed McCracken. He came from Silicon Graphics, a billion-dollar company that was hoping to make a fortune off the new video technology.
Clearly entertainment was what counted most here. The term National Information Infrastructure just didn’t suffice. A more accurate description, given the paucity of librarians, educators, and journalists on the council, would have been the National Entertainment Infrastructure. Yes, people like Vance Opperman were interested in electronic text, but, above all, from a business perspective. Let the masses watch TV. His company would make a fortune selling pricey information to the elite.
Mass literacy just wasn’t the main show here, not with all the dutiful suits watching out for the earnings of CBS or Disney or Microsoft or West, and without enough librarians and others to balance them out.
A host of other issues remained. How fascinating that so many of the most influential people in the Clinton galaxy were from outfits such as telephone companies that wanted to profit off both transmission and content. Despite all the rhetoric, I wondered how attentive the Clintonians would be to, say, little companies that were more interested in producing books or folk albums than in financing Terminators or laying fiber optic cables.
Could money and politics have mattered just a little in the selection of people for the NII Advisory Council? If nothing else, a few questions arose in the case of West Publishing, the giant publisher of legal information. Vance Opperman was friends with Mack McLarty, Clinton’s first chief of staff.[6.48] What’s more, Opperman cochaired the finance committee during the 1994 reelection campaign of Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic U.S. senator from California who sat on a copyright subcommittee within the Judiciary Committee.[6.49] A study by the Taxpayer Assets Project, one of Ralph Nader’s groups, revealed how civic-minded West was. By way of a political-action committee and gifts from lawyers, lobbyists, and family members, the West crowd in five years had given more than $738,000 to Congress members and the Democratic National Committee.
Judges, too, must have loved the company. A West-run foundation had dispensed $15,000 awards to federal judges for “distinguished service to justice.” Over a dozen years, the selection committee had included seven past or present members of the U.S. Supreme Court, the ultimate interpreter of copyright law. West had paid for trips to places as far off as Hawaii and the Virgin Islands. Benefiting, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, were Justices Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, and now-retired Justices Lewis Powell, Byron White, and William Brennan.[6.50]
West impressed me. Via campaign gifts, friends, and favors such as the trips, Opperman’s crew had cozied up to all three branches of government—the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.
Eager to see how representative West was with its people’s political gifts, I phoned the Center for Responsive Politics, the Washington-based group from which I simultaneously got information about Lehman. Would the Center please send me a printout of congressional and presidential donations from some other members of the NII Advisory Council and from people and political-action committees associated with their companies?
A list arrived for the period between January 1, 1991, and November 28, 1994, and I scanned down the names on the laser-printed sheets. The Walt Disney people hadn’t disappointed me. Advisory Council member John F. Cooke, president of the Disney Channel, had given at least $48,000 to politicians from coast to coast and to Democratic organizations. Non-Council member Jeffrey Katzenberg, then with the Disney conglomerate, had donated at least $63,000 in one way or another.
I saw at least $400,000 in Disney-related gifts—donations from top executives were just the start. Cook and Katzenberg on their own couldn’t sway the White House and Congress, nor even could all of Disney; but imagine what Hollywood and other rich industries could do en masse to influence copyright and telecommunications policies. What counted most wasn’t the person but the industry. At one recent gathering at Steven Spielberg’s mansion—in spring 1995, a time not covered by the laser-printed sheet—Bill Clinton had raised $50,000 per couple.
Whatever the case, the stray change added up. Over at MCA, Advisory Council member Alvin Teller gave at least $28,250 between early 1991 and late 1994, while Lew Wasserman, a nonmember, gave at least $87,000. Advisory Council member Jack Valenti, Hollywood’s big lobbyist in D.C., donated at least $56,250.
Advisory Council member Stanley Hubbard, chairman and chief executive of Hubbard Broadcasting in Minnesota, also made a good showing. He and relatives gave at least $74,000 to people on the Hill, political-action committees, and the Democratic Party. Confronted with $1,000-per-election limits on political gifts to members of Congress, Hubbard just spread his money around, as if using greenbacks like calling cards. His donations reached powers such as Representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who, until the Republican victory in 1994, chaired the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance. Many saw Markey as one of the more progressive NII players. Just think, however, what such politicians could have done without the distractions of special-interest money—donations not only to them but also to colleagues who would be more susceptible to pressure.
Telephone executives made the NII sugar-daddies list, of course. Advisory Council member Bert Roberts Jr., MCI’s chairman and CEO, gave at least $28,000 to an MCI political-action committee and to politicians, ranging from Senator Bob Packwood to, yes, Edward Markey. A supporting cast came from the ranks of the MCI employees, including one of my techie heroes, Vint Cerf, “Mr. Internet,” who contributed at least $1,000 to the same PAC as Roberts.
Advisory Council member James Houghton of Corning Glass donated more than $50,000 to members of Congress across the country, and to party, presidential, and PAC funds. Corning, of course, was rooting for fiberglass cable—a rival in some ways to wireless technology, which some on the Internet considered the future.
No, the millionaires on the Advisory Council had not committed crimes or bribed anyone. Under the law, they had a right to give massive amounts to campaigns as long as each gift did not exceed the legal limits. To my knowledge no money had come from anyone’s corporate tills, just from individuals and the political-action committees to which they had lawfully contributed. Besides, just like Lehman, many other rich donors must have had the most heartfelt of reasons for personal donations, going far beyond copyright and telecommunications issues. Even though copyright holders had donated to many well-positioned politicians such as Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was active on intellectual property matters, that was hardly the only reason why Hollywood millionaires gave. The woman was a California Democrat. Many people at companies such as MCA were the same. If a Californian, I myself might have voted for her.
Likewise, the people of West Publishing must have had varied motives in contributing.[6.51] Vance Opperman was a former antiwar protester and probably still saw himself as a force for social good. I suspected, too, that he loved seeing his old friend Al Gore grow in power. At the 1992 Democratic Convention Opperman had described himself as a “political junkie” who enjoyed hosting political receptions for fun. “I don’t expect to get any political benefits out of them.”[6.52]
Replying on February 22, 1995, to questions from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Opperman’s company noted that all donations were legal and on record at the Federal Election Commission. “It appears that you believe the laws regarding these matters should be changed,” West said. “If so, the proper thing for you to do is to seek to change these laws rather than criticize those who carefully comply with existing law.” The company denied any efforts to influence officials improperly. West said that its employees, its political-action committee, and its counsel all had “long histories of being active in the political process. It is inaccurate to tie their donations over the past 20 years to any specific issue of legislation pending before a government body. Your inference that such donations have been made as one collective effort is also totally untrue.”[6.53]
West pointed out to the Star Tribune that people from rival information companies were also making contributions. But of course! Money always counted in politics. Vance Opperman had put it well several years ago as head of Opperman Heins & Paquin, a leading law firm notable for PAC gifts to Minneapolis politicians. “If we have those who oppose the interests of our clients,” he said, “we do not support them.” He said the law firm’s PAC ran under this philosophy: “Support your friends. Punish your enemies.”[6.54]
Presumably Bill Clinton and Al Gore would rather avoid punishment from the Oppermans of this nation. While almost ignoring librarians and educators, the Administration had appointed to its Advisory Council some members of the elite who were already over-represented in the political process. Did Vance Opperman, as a friend of Gore’s, really have to worry about the Vice President reading his letters? I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had Gore’s private e-mail address. Just how many electronic entreaties to the Hill, or to the Clinton-Gore area on the Web, would it take to neutralize the little fortune donated by friends of West Publishing? I couldn’t have agreed more with Cliff Stoll when he wrote that Washington often ignored citizens’ e-mail. It all figured. The Power People were too busy raising donations from millionaires and political-action committees—hardly the biggest champions of low-cost knowledge.
Granted, some optimists hoped that the Internet itself could help turn around Washington. Aided by the Net, a group in Washington State had gathered $26,000 to help defeat Tom Foley, then the Democratic Speaker of the House. And NewtWatch, an anti-Gingrich effort on the World Wide Web, had registered as a political-action committee. Some members of both major parties were hoping to use the Net to raise money efficiently from small donors.[6.55]
That was far from a full answer, though. Even before I learned of all the campaign cash from some members of the Advisory Council, I had wondered about the group’s odd composition. Not everyone on the council was rich, of course, far from it. But why had business prevailed so brazenly over the general public and Al Gore’s little neighbor back in Tennessee, the one who was supposed to dial up books from the Library of Congress regardless of family income? Just one teacher and one librarian? In politer language I’d sent the question on to a White House staffer, and he had patiently explained to me that Washington had to serve the needs of the “stakeholders.”
I loved the word. It sounded so innocent, so natural, so philosophical. What if this were eighteenth-century France, the revolution were on, and Marie Antoinette looked like guillotine fodder? Armed with such a marvelous locution, she could forego all references to bread and cake and simply say, “Stop! I’m one of the stakeholders.”
Now having documented a nice flow of money from “stakeholders” to politicians, especially Democrats, I remembered how many Watergate-era ambassadorships had gone to the highest bidders. Wasn’t the same ethos at work here as Richard Nixon’s? I knew of no broken laws—but perhaps that was the trouble.
“I remember when I got on Energy and Commerce, everybody jumped for the Telecommunications Subcommittee first,” Peter Kostmayer, a former Democratic representative from Pennsylvania, said as quoted by veteran political journalist Martin Schram. “There was a member sitting next to me, and every time another member bid for that committee, he went ‘Ding!’—as if a cash register was going off.”[6.56] When politicians talked about the need for election reform and clean, ethical government, many were themselves superb examples of the need for action.
Maybe, I’d thought earlier, I could at least enjoy an open-minded hearing from a nonmillionaire on the Advisory Council. Bonnie Bracey was the only elementary school teacher. She should have loved TeleRead.
But during an official virtual conference organized on the Net by the Commerce Department, she went after not Opperman but me. “I am not the least interested in the TeleReader,” she said in a public message, “and I don’t have any money after trying to do this job to invest anyway.” I was and am a writer. Last I knew, I had not been selling computers. Bracey needed to scrutinize my proposal. Maybe she could then dismiss it as a nefarious writer’s plot. TeleRead did, after all, propose a massive shifting of resources from bureaucracy to various forms of knowledge, including—gasp!—electronic books.
At times, Bracey would e-mail me that my proposal intrigued her, but somehow she would never get around to study it, or at least to telling me that she had gone beyond summaries. She would repeat the usual clichés that citizens didn’t want to spend money on schools. Toward TeleRead’s cost-justification mechanisms, toward the support that it could win among frugal, business-oriented conservatives such as William Buckley, she was unresponsive. Granted, she wasn’t callous about the children TeleRead could help. At the personal level she had been exemplary, spending hundreds and perhaps thousands of dollars on hardware and software that she could use in her classes. But TeleRead for her could have been a bother. Offensively, perhaps, it meant a national library online for all, regardless of whether they happened to be students anywhere.
TeleRead, however, was hardly antischool, given all the new possibilities it could open up online for teachers and students. Looking back, I just wished that Bracey had seen a note I received from a teacher in Illinois who had asked more than sixty magazines for permission to reprint articles for her small class at no profit. Only twenty-five publications had gone along. “We were ignored sometimes,” the woman had e-mailed me, “and once I was told, by phone, never to use any articles from that publication. That was Windows Magazine, and I didn’t renew my subscription.” Of her anthology, she had said: “It’s a better textbook because it’s more up to date.” Clearly we could never separate “educational” uses of the NII from the rest; an article from a commercial magazine could actually prove so much more valuable than an instantly obsolete textbook. TeleRead would make back issues of magazines available for free, make current ones easier to obtain, and, above all, allow free textbooks to be updated instantly, complete with hypertext links to the rest of the national library.
But predictably the NII Advisory Council ignored TeleRead and more or less green-lighted the Green Paper. The council for the most part came out in favor of publishers enjoying control over transmission rights. In effect these people were kissing off the idea of a comprehensive, cost-justified library that all Americans could afford to use online, whether for school or for self-improvement. As I was concluding this book, it wasn’t certain that the Green Paper would slither its way into law in more or less the original form. But the news from Capitol Hill didn’t cheer me. The Republican Congress appeared to be at least as skewed in favor of copyright holders as were the Democrats.
Even diluted (and renamed the White Paper in the final version), the Green Paper might well be a disgrace. I worried about the rest of the world. Imagine the Australians or Europeans looking to the United States for leadership in Net-related copyright matters. To me, the Green Paper bore the stains of greenbacks. People around D.C. had a polite little word, “access.” It didn’t mean legal violations, but rather purchases of policymakers’ ears. Information magnates had access. I wondered if the little child in Al Gore’s hometown gave so faithfully to major politicians, flew Supreme Court justices to Hawaii, and doled out $15,000 “justice” awards.
The Green Paper, alas, was just one indication of many big shots’ willingness to work against the citizenry. Again and again the denizens of Capitol Hill bragged about Americans being able to dial up the text of proposed legislation through a service called Thomas. And yet some Congress members still hoped to work out deals before the public saw the results on the Net. Friends of West Publishing used exactly such tactics on the Hill to try to reduce the amount of information that the government released for free. West and similar companies wanted to be able to profit off public data. So their congressional allies were hoping to cancel out the Freedom of Information Act in cases where federal contractors had created records.
Any weakening of the act would make me very grouchy; it had opened up many kind of government information for free or at affordable costs. I had benefited. Two decades ago the General Services Administration had tried unsuccessfully to charge me $20,000 to learn details about the government’s office-leasing program. Using this first-class muck, I had shown that then-Senator Abraham Ribicoff secretly owned a stake in a building that the GSA leased for the Central Intelligence Agency. I had learned, too, of a friend of Spiro Agnew who had been able to avoid building a half-million-dollar cafeteria required by the lease for the headquarters building of the Environmental Protection Agency. Because of the Information Act, I had been able to report both stories and get them out in the press and on network television. I had spent months camped out at the GSA, perusing documents; imagine what I could have done with a computer to ferret out digitized muck. And so I was dismayed to learn that some in Congress wanted to weaken the Information Act—this in an era when the Internet supposedly would open up Washington. If not fully Orwellian, such hypocrisy didn’t promote democratic alternatives to Big Brother.
Uppity activists used the Net to thwart West at least for the moment. A bill introduced by Representative William Clinger, a Republican from Pennsylvania, was to be heard in a subcommittee and rushed through a committee edit in just a few days with West-friendly provisions. But James Love of the Taxpayer Assets Project caught wind of the shenanigans; Jim Warren pitched in with his own jeremiads in Government Access, his online newsletter; and furious Netfolks called and faxed the Hill. West may have really lost when the Republicans found out through the Internet about the firm’s generosity toward the Democratic Party, to which its executives gave far more than to the competition. “Why are we doing this?” the Republicans, in effect, may have wondered.
Only because of some extraordinary diligence by Love and allies did the public win here. Newt Gingrich could talk all he wanted about the Net putting citizens and lobbyists on an equal footing, but without a constant watch on the Hill, scene of so many crimes, the same power cliques would keep winning again and again, banana-republic fashion. West might yet succeed.
Around this same time, Sally Katzen, a top bureaucrat with Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget had asked Congress to make certain that the Feds could charge more for information in some cases than the cost of spreading it. They would be able to do this after posting notices in the Federal Register. And then, if insufficient protests ensued, the info-gouges could begin. Katzen’s proposal didn’t fly, but its very existence was bothersome enough. The idea hardly jibed with all the nice rhetoric from the White House about using the Net to promote open government. So much for freedom of information, Clinton style.
Meanwhile I forged ahead with my TeleRead efforts, perhaps not for this Congress and this White House, but maybe for those in the future—once enough voters understood that we mustn’t replicate online the “savage inequalities” of our schools and libraries. TeleRead if nothing else was a handy litmus test to find out which policymakers were sincere when they talked about the need for true public libraries in cyberspace, as opposed to just digital storefronts with links to publishers. Good people could disagree with me. But when politicians and their flunkies did not bother to hear me out despite my idea’s credentials, I was reminded of how democratic Washington was toward Power People and how oligarchic it was toward the rest of the cosmos. Sometimes I felt that my location, in Alexandria, Virginia, was metaphorical. My apartment was just inside the Washington Beltway.
The question of the moment wasn’t just one of copyright. It was also one of democracy itself, both the decision process and the aftermath. What about the Copyright Gestapo? In the future might the Feds monitor the activities of Republicans more closely than they would those of Democrats? Would Republicans be more susceptible to charges of intellectual piracy when they did the inevitable and tried to share old newspaper clips over the Net? Or vice versa? Would the Democrats suffer discrimination? What about Italy, where the machine-gun-toting cops had invoked software piracy laws against leftist bulletin boards but not against conservative ones? But the Clintonians, so eager to serve their political friends, were just as cavalier toward these possibilities as toward the civil liberties risk of Clipper.
Ultimately the copyright-holders’ victory just might be Pyrrhic. Someday the political terrain could shift and millions of children might grow up on free, government-commissioned books. Or, perhaps instead, videos in too many cases would replace text. So we were better off if, as soon as possible, we used networks to spread privately originated books through a free, well-stocked library system. TeleRead could indeed help many in the information industry. From Lexis-Nexis to Random House, companies could turn profits off dial-up fees, either from works they commissioned directly or from rights they bought from authors. TeleRead wasn’t a threat to information companies if they truly added value such as editing or marketing. Even West could benefit. TeleRead would let Opperman’s company reap many millions off dial-up rights—not only to legal writings but also to other kinds—if the market favored it.
No, the real losers would be the bureaucrats, whose work, after all, would be less in demand in an era of electronic forms in mass use. And even they could have a soft landing. TeleRead would hardly take place instantly, and it would remove much of the scut work from the remaining jobs in government. TeleRead was anti-bureaucracy, not anti-bureaucrat. For the moment, however, as shown by the obtuseness of the GSA man at the hearing, the resistance was there.
Some lessons were emerging. Hundreds of people had e-mailed me for copies of TeleRead. “Even anti-taxers like me would be willing to foot the bill for something so practical and knowledge infectious,” a home schooler in Illinois had said. The head of the Digital Publishing Association, an organization consisting mostly of small publishers and writers, had loved TeleRead. “Instead of flooding the young mind with yet another sitcom or soap,” he had said, “TeleRead would allow video to present them with quality reading materials.” And yet our wishes had not meant squat.
David Lytel, the White House staffer, may have pressed his delete key almost as soon as the TeleRead proposal reached him over the Net. He and his colleagues at the Lehman hearings hadn’t followed up my official testimony with a single question in person or by phone or e-mail. The hearings had been a big farce, a caricature of a public relations exercise. I might as well have been Winston Smith deviating from the plot and making a few friendly suggestions to one of Big Brother’s TV cameras. No one would shoot or torture me for saying the wrong things, but on the major NII issues the Clinton people were about as open as Big Brother to ideas from below, Net or no Net.
I wasn’t the only writer with a few feelings on the subject of Executive listening skills in this networked era. A New York Times columnist later told how cavalier the White House crowd had been toward the e-mail from her. I’d actually gotten farther than she had. At least Gore had sent me a higher class of boilerplate. Perhaps that was because I had actually used conventional rather than electronic mail, and had enclosed a photocopy of a TeleRead article from the Washington Post. Article or not, however, the White House had thumbed its nose at me. While Clinton and Gore couldn’t reply to every citizen, the composition of the citizens’ advisory council had made clear what the NII priorities were, even in the age of Cyber Socks: Big Government serving Big Business.
Clinton-Gore had better change if they wanted my vote in ’96. Rather than just sharing Sock’s meows and feeling ever so smug about high-tech democracy, they needed to spend time more listening to us nonlobbyists and a little less time keeping Vance Opperman happy. Democracy should not mean just a dialogue between the White House and the usual “stakeholders.”
As is obvious by now, intrusive government officials love to fixate on net.sex. But something else is happening as shown in the next chapter: net.love. Let’s hope that Exon and company can tell the difference.