Ironica's Journal: Digital Information as a Public Good

First off, let me explain that I'm a first year MA student in Urban Planning at UCLA. That puts this in context a little bit.

So this morning I was sitting in Introduction to History and Theories of Planning, and the topic of public goods came up. It's a frequent cause of discussion in planning circles. The definition of a public good that they've pounded into our heads has two parts:

1. It is impossible or unfeasible to control access to the good.
2. It is not consumed by use; it can be used by an unlimited number of people without being used up.

Economists sometimes describe public goods as an example of a market failure. Since it is not possible to consume or to control access to a public good, the market cannot regulate it through supply, demand, and pricing. People are liable to underreport their desire for the good, in order to avoid paying their fair share (the free rider problem) or it may be that no individual values the good enough to pay for it to be set up, though it may be beneficial to everyone (such as a symphony orchestra). In some cases, no individual *can* buy/create/establish a particular public good; imagine if United had to build their own airport in every city they wanted to fly to, or that you and your neighbors had to get together and lay a new sewer pipe.

Planners and other social science types often argue that market failures are areas where government can and should step in and regulate the situation, even in a free market economy. Through taxes and other assessments, governments can evenly distribute the financial burden of providing public goods, so as to ensure they are available to all that want or need them.

So it suddenly struck me that, according to the definition I provided above, digital information is a public good. Since the quality doesn't degrade as you create new copies, and the cost of copying is practically nil, it is not consumed by use. It is currently impossible to really prevent information from being shared, as well. Access can be controlled only through relatively extreme measures; for example, the military has installations that literally have no connection to the outside world via anything but the front door, so information can only be hand-carried out. Palladium is an enormous effort being put forth to control access to information, and there's no sure bet that it will actually work. It may simply make information harder for people to use legitimately to the same degree that it prevents illegitimate use.

So, what? Well, then, I would argue that government needs to take an active role in provisioning the public good of digital information. Exactly what form this role should take is a little more difficult; I just had this thought today, give me time. ;-) But certainly this would be a new role for organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, or a justification for regulating some software companies like public utilities. In any event, going on pretending that we can control access to digital information isn't going to solve anything. We need to think of it in a new way.