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The Government Should Regulate Technology

Author: William J. Ray
Editor: Auriana Ojeda
Date: 2002
From: Technology and Society
Publisher: Gale
Series: Opposing Viewpoints
Document Type: Viewpoint essay
Length: 2,182 words
Content Level: (Level 4)
Lexile Measure: 1200L

Full Text:
Article Commentary
Reprinted, with permission, from "Power to the People," by William J. Ray, Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy, Winter
1998.

In the following viewpoint, William J. Ray argues that the government has a responsibility to its citizens to provide the technological
advances that will better their lives. The recent surge in information technology with personal computers and the Internet, he argues,
has created an inequity within society that the government is responsible for rectifying. He and others contend that the government
ought to regulate the prices and distribution of telecommunications technology, as private sectors unnecessarily inflate the costs and
exclude less fortunate citizens. Ray is superintendent of Glasgow Electric Plant Board in Glasgow, Kentucky.
As you read, consider the following questions:
1. What was the first serious experiment with electricity, and when did it take place?
2. According to the author, how do investor-owned utility companies threaten democracy?
3. What effect, according to the author, does the Telecommunications Act of 1996 have on the FCC?

Public power is the result of a serendipitous arrangement formed more than 100 years ago. The most important ingredients were the
human desire for a better life through the use of electric power and the philosophy of affirmative government—the idea that
government has a responsibility. to ensure that all its citizens, rich and poor alike, have access to technologies that can improve their
lives.

A new technology—broadband telecommunications—could eclipse even electric power in its capacity to improve our lives. This
system of fiber optic cables and electronics, capable of delivering competitive cable television, telephone service, and high-speed
computer networking to every home and business, has the potential to invigorate local economies and improve the lives of citizens in
the same way that electric utilities did in the first half of the 20th century. It needs only affirmative government to democratize it.

History Lesson
Contrary to popular belief, the development of electric power did not begin in the United States. The first serious experimentation on
electricity took place in Europe in 1730 with the invention of the Leyden Jar, a device developed to build up and store an electric
charge. But for decades the phenomenon remained a curiosity with no practical application. The real potential for electric power
began to take shape during the early 1800s with the development of the electromagnet, the telegraph, and crude electric motors.
America really became excited about electric power when early arc lighting was demonstrated in Paris and London in 1877. The
prospect of lighting city streets launched the new industry.

From the very beginning, the visionaries creating the new industry were more interested in its profit potential than its potential ability
to improve the lot of ordinary citizens. Because people wanted greater access to electricity than the industry was able or willing to
provide, some cities sought, through affirmative government initiatives, to provide this service for themselves.

In April 1893, Detroit citizens voted 15,282 to 1,745 on an advisory ballot in favor of creating a municipally owned electric plant.
Detroit Electric Light and Power (DELP) and its parent company, General Electric Company, fought against the effort. "If the city were
to do its own lighting at about half what other companies bid, it would establish a bad precedent," warned William H. Fitzgerald,
general manager of DELP.

The new mayor of Detroit, Hazen Pingree, a prosperous shoe manufacturer and municipal reformer, countered DELP's argument. "If
this is done," Pingree declared, "it will take electric lights out of the luxuries of life, only to be used by the wealthy, and place it within
the reach of the humblest of citizens." The resistance that Pingree encountered in providing the common people with electric power
as a nonprofit service is the same that affirmative governments run up against today when they seek to democratize other
technologies.

Successful Affirmative Government

For centuries, affirmative government has been used successfully in America as an economic development tool, but it has always
been controversial. For example, when John Quincy Adams and Albert Gallatin, Thomas Jefferson's secretary of the Treasury,
proposed a detailed 10-year plan for the construction of roads and canals by the government, their plan was rejected.

Gallatin contended that development of the transportation network could not "be left to individual exertion" because of its overarching
importance to the future of the republic. Yet the system of improvements he and Adams proposed was never implemented. In 1837,
Adams lamented:

With this system ten years from this day the surface of the whole Union would have been checkered over with railroads
and canals. It may still be done half a century later and with the limping gait of State legislature and private adventure. I
would have done it in the administration of the affairs of the nation.... I fell and with me fell, I fear never to rise again, the
system of internal improvement by means of national energies.

Fortunately, Adams was wrong. A hundred years later, his proposals were adopted by Franklin Roosevelt when he created the
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and, with it, public power. And in another 30 years, the federal government developed the
interstate highway system.

Adams and Roosevelt both understood the power of affirmative government to advance economic development for the many instead
of the few. They realized that turnpikes, canals, and electric systems need not always be built for the purpose of connecting thriving
communities; rather, they could also be built to penetrate the wilderness in the hope of creating thriving communities. Roosevelt's
strong belief in public power systems and his success in creating the TVA proved the wisdom of this philosophy.

New Threats
Public power systems have succeeded in democratizing electric power. Yet under the guise of deregulation, new initiatives by
investor-owned utilities threaten to eliminate public power from the landscape. Investor-owned utilities—which first proposed our
present system of regulation as a means of stemming the creation of public power systems—now want that system dismantled. They
want to return to the good old days, before public power, when they could operate without competition.

They would even like to abolish regulations that prevent them from consolidating and expanding. Even now these utilities are merging
and aggregating assets at a rate comparable to that of the 1920s, when they were in their heyday. The days of the trusts are
returning.

How is this possible? Well, we have today a complete void of affirmative government philosophy: In 1912 even staunch private
business proponents like Woodrow Wilson recognized that "without the watchful interference, the resolute interference of the
government, there can be no fair play between individuals and such powerful institutions as the trusts." Yet in 1998, investor-owned
electric utilities, telephone companies, and cable television companies have been able to convince ordinary citizens that Ronald
Reagan was right: "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem."

Threatening Democracy
Reagan's principles are still the rage in Washington. Unfortunately, his idea of getting government off the back of business has
resulted in business on the back of government. While attacks on federal authority are conducted in the name of state and local
rights, the real beneficiary is corporate power. As a result, the giant corporations threaten democracy itself.

Henry Adams examined this issue as early as 1870. The Erie Railroad, he wrote, had "proved itself able to override and trample on
law, custom, decency, and every restraint known to society, without scruple, and as yet without check. The belief is common in
America that the day is at hand when corporations far greater than Erie ... will ultimately succeed in directing government itself."

Today, that belief is closer to reality than it has ever been. BellSouth, TCI, AT&T, and other corporations force our legislators to seek
their approval before passing laws. A recent example is Microsoft's suggestion that our national economy would be slowed
significantly if the government tried to interfere in its release of Windows 98. According to Bill Gates, what's good for Microsoft is good
for America. It seems that Adams' pessimism was well founded.

New Possibilities
Like electric power in the early years of this century, broadband telecommunications offers rural Americans access to the same
goods and services as their urban cousins. However, this technology needs the intervention of government to democratize its spread.
The story of Glasgow, Kentucky, illustrates the benefits available to rural communities that practice the philosophy of affirmative
government.

In 1988, the Glasgow Electric Plant Board (GEPB), a municipally owned public power system, responded to citizens' needs for
competitive cable television and other telecommunications services by constructing a broadband telecommunications network
throughout this rural community of 14,000 people.

The GEPB built a network capable of delivering services the private sector found unprofitable or just too risky. Its low-cost cable
television service—providing 52-channel cable for just $14.25 per month—caused the incumbent private cable operator to lower its
rates and improve its service. And the GEPB's four-megabit-per-second computer connection and Internet access costs only $20 per
month. Comparable service from a telephone company might cost more than $1,000 a month.

The GEPB used its existing poles, trucks, billing system, and expertise to make broadband communications accessible to all
Glasgow's citizens. Local residents have benefitted from the arrangement: lower cable rates have freed up millions of dollars to be
spent in the local economy and created new jobs and new businesses. Furthermore, GEPB's high speed local area network (LAN)
connections and Internet access have increased the profits and services of local businesses and helped them run more efficiently.

Improving Community
It is doubtful whether any private business would find the Glasgow broadband network financially attractive. While the
network—which cost Glasgow residents roughly 4 million dollars to build—now produces enough revenue to make it a break-even
proposition, it does not add to the city's coffers. Yet like other city infrastructure such as water and sewer connections, sidewalks, and
parks, the network improves the life of Glasgow's citizens and encourages the growth of new businesses. And all these benefits have
been achieved without increasing taxes or electricity rates.

GEPB's success could be replicated by other power companies around the country. But standing in the way are the same forces that
Hazen Pingree had to face down in Detroit a hundred years ago. This time, the opposition comes not from General Electric, but from
telephone and cable companies that convince state legislatures to ban affirmative government. These companies compel weak-
minded state legislators to pass laws making municipal operation of broadband telecommunications systems illegal. By so doing, they
condemn rural citizens either to live without the new technologies that have revolutionized business in urban communities or to pay
exorbitant rates to behemoth cable and telephone companies.

The federal government also shares the blame here. The Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 directs the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) to strike down any state or local law that has the effect of eliminating any entity from providing
telecommunications services. Yet the presently impotent FCC refuses to do so for fear of stepping on the toes of state legislatures.
Even though the federal government has affirmed the Bill of Rights against local vigilantism, preserved natural resources against
local greed, civilized industry, secured the rights of labor organizations, improved income for the farmer, and provided a decent living
for the old, today's FCC still feels powerless to implement the will of Congress. Had the present states' rights philosophy espoused by
the FCC existed in the past, there would still be slavery in the United States.

Limitless Benefits
It is obvious that the democratization of electric power through affirmative government has provided, and continues to provide,
unfathomable benefits to our people and our economy. The GEPB project allows us to glimpse the possible benefits of doing the
same with broadband telecommunications. The time has come for affirmative government to set this process in motion.

The cable and telephone companies will surely howl about the socialistic implications of this course, but history does not validate their
claims. Affirmative government programs such as public power have not set our nation on the road to totalitarianism. Fifty years ago,
statesman Thurman Arnold scoffed at "the absurd idea that dictatorships are the result of a long series of small seizures of power on
the part of the central government." In fact, the exact opposite is true. As Arnold pointed out, "every dictatorship which we know
flowed into power like air into a vacuum because the central government, in the face of real difficulty, declined to exercise authority."
Or, as Franklin Roosevelt observed, "History proves that dictatorships do not grow out of strong and successful governments, but out
of weak and helpless ones."

The success of the mixture of electric power and affirmative government cannot be denied. Even though the investor-owned utilities
have fought this mixture with every fiber of their being, in retrospect it has been good even for them. The profits of investor-owned
utilities have steadily risen over the last 60 years, as has the standard of living in the United States. It is not time to water down this
solution, but rather to apply it to the next great technological innovation: broadband telecommunications.

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Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 Greenhaven Press, COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale

Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
Ray, William J. "The Government Should Regulate Technology." Technology and Society, edited by Auriana Ojeda, Greenhaven
Press, 2002. Opposing Viewpoints. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints,
[Link]/apps/doc/EJ3010234209/OVIC?u=supp45712&sid=bookmark-OVIC&xid=b0594b51. Accessed 16 Nov. 2025.
Originally published as "Power to the People," Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy, winter 1998.
Gale Document Number: GALE|EJ3010234209