"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Yogi Berra

Information Revolution
Introduction
In a sense, we are talking about a cultural revolution. Transportation and communication have so brought the world together that differences that were once like on a different planet are in our back yard. At the same time, political struggles and their aftermath have favored strategies to prevent war, to counter flagrant abuses of human rights by autocratic powers and to create friendship and trust through trade. Idealistic? Of course, well intended? Mostly, but attended by opportunity, thus the conflicts of the 21st century. Globalization, WTO, World Bank, multi national corporations, Middle East oil, Asian and Mexican labor, Vietnamese coffee and extreme wealth to Islamic countries, all well intended but bringing about displacement and conflict of cultures. Not so different from colonialism or communism for that matter, our expansion causes displacements and cultural change, except from our viewpoint we offer human rights and freedom. Perhaps freedom is a difficult concept to grasp in a region where land is shared and property is measured by goats and cattle, and where a water pump that brings life to drought ridden land is stolen in the night. These conflicts and displacements of bygone expansions, the days of empire and colonialism brought slavery and Syphilis. Today we have terrorism and AIDS. Perhaps we should head the Star Trek prime directive of not disturbing an alien culture in its early development.
At the very time we, for better or for worse, export our Western Culture there brews a profound struggle within, as to how we view information. Is Information a clear First Amendment issue? Yes, but free information comes as a threat to many established institutions. For example, advertising seeks to direct our behavior by controlling the information that we see and hear to the point of saturation. Religious denominations do the same. How saturated is your mind after a call to prayer five times a day. The healing professions and legal professions too for that matter hold their knowledge close and dispense it dearly. The recording industry and the motion associations guard their copyright with a strangle hold on our culture. The phone companies hold a similar strangle hold on the flow of information.
The concatenation of four technologies, digital, the chip, the Internet and photonics, or quantum physics, are changing everything. These technologies developed simultaneously. They are interrelated. They are at the beginning edge of their evolution. We can only imagine what that evolution may entail. First, there was the digital representation of all kinds of information, graphics, data, text, voice and video. Digital mapping has the potential to create a complete virtual representation of the world and everything in it. Second was the chip, developed largely to manipulate digital information. What occupied a whole building during WWII can mow be put on a chip the size of one's finger. The reduction of size and cost with increasing capacity and speed seems to have no limit. The third technology was the Internet, actually the protocols that allowed routing of digital packets of information through a web of connected nodes finding the path of least resistance to their assigned destination. The fourth and probably the least understood was the redefinition of electrical engineering and optical engineering by advances in quantum physics. That light is transparent is intuitive, but the development of radio along carrier waves masked the potential transparency of radio waves or of EM, electro magnetic radiation, as the physicist would put it.
Digital and chips of rapidly developing computing met little resistance. There was a race with Japan for technological leadership. There was a ready supply of venture capital. Industry and the government benefited greatly from the productivity these technologies generated. Initially the Internet was met with the same support and was adopted widely by government and industry on private networks or virtual private networks. For the consumer it was productive but not in the same way as for centralized industry. Large private networks advanced dramatically with gigabit or greater bandwidth. Consumer connectivity lagged far behind. Herein lays the conflict.
First, the phone companies, all of them, are faced with a dilemma. Their age old paradigm as a utility, their economic assumption, are based on delivering reliable phone service to customers who are accustomed to paying a fixed monthly price for the privilege of the service. They find themselves host to the Internet, a technology connected to the digital and computer industry with a fast changing environment based on the assumption of decreasing size and price, with increasing capacity, doubling every eighteen months. The phone companies have no plans for reducing your phone bill, ever. Furthermore, the growth in bandwidth soon makes VOIP, voice over the Internet free at any distance. There is some legal question as to who actually owns the phone lines. The added value that the phone company has been reliably providing for generations could suddenly evaporate. The phone company knows well what it can charge the government and bigger businesses for bandwidth and how that price has been falling. They must one find a way to make bandwidth a scarce commodity so they can charge for it, and two centrally control the switching so as to maintain a faucet for regulating traffic and maintaining control of the pipes. Simultaneously the government needs to monitor traffic in its war on terrorism, and the movie industry, the music industry successfully lobby for extension of copyright laws to protect their intellectual property from this Internet, this library that has gone global.
Now for the least understood struggle. Fourthly, the media finds revenue in the exclusivity of its TV channels and in the advertising revenue based on that exclusivity. Any use of the airways for greater content, greater connectivity, the transmission of information or worse yet the inter communication of what they consider their exclusive audience decreases their thought control and thus their value as advertising media. There is thus great resistance to allowing the deployment of technology, which might utilize an airway commons by multiple users transparently and without interference. The governments may have similar needs, one to control the thinking of their citizens, and two to monitor the content of the communication. The most advanced form of quantum radio is used by our own government. They may be reluctant to share the same technology with the world. Furthermore, our government does not want to offer the world a device that terrorists can use undetected.
So, the stage is set for a battle-by-battle assessment of the struggle. We use this analogy to depict the strength and goodness of light and the photon in this struggle for free expression and sharing of information. Contrast the benefits of free information, education, understanding and productivity with the stagnation and economic burden created by resisting governments, monopolies and cartels. We further argue that free sharing of the air and information offers more revenue and more productivity to government, to the economy, to the people and potentially to the incumbent industries that feel its threat than the present position of exclusive rights. The book further argues that it is more conservative to keep pace with change but self-destructive even radical to obstruct progress and suppress technology.
It is a cultural struggle too. Our culture hidden from the world and from ourselves by the monetary interests of media, the recording industry and the motion picture industry. A culture of excess and greed emanates from these institutions, defining our psyche and influencing our choices. The art that is produced finds itself locked away from the public domain and dispensed at high prices or not at all. We are locked in cultural isolation, but for that which they feed us --- or from our local art, music and dramatic productions. The Internet is changing all of that. With bandwidth in the gigabit range a free flow of information seems inevitable and with it hopefully will come an up welling of our culture.