Towards a Political Economy of Information: Studies on the Information Economy

Description

ICTs and the Internet do have a dark side, as Verzola clearly points out. Policy-makers, educators, parents, as well as students must read this book, especially if they intend to invest huge amount of money, resources or time in these technologies. When a phenomenon is one that can change our lives and those of our children and grandchildren, We must look at it from different perspectives. We need, at the very least, a second opinion. What this book offers is a very well argued second opinion, that reveals is the dark side of ICTs and suggest ways to cope with it. Towards a Political Economy of Information Table of Contents Part I. Information and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) 1. The miracle of the loaves 2. A new offensive against the Third World Goodbye to low-cost textbooks Affordable computing may soon end Receiving license required? Higher pharmaceutical prices? Privatizing life forms 3. U.S. piracy in the 19th century 4. The “piracy” of intellectuals 5. GATT: Free Trade or Monopoly Growth? Patents and copyrights are monopolies Restricting monopolies GATT strengthens monopolies Restricted compulsory licensing Rental rights Importation rights Guilty until proven innocent No need to disclose Stronger enforcement 6. IPR: a clash of value-systems Piracy: good or bad? Agriculture Industry The information sector Misapplied values 7. Towards a political economy of information Who needs the highway that is under construction? The transformation of the U.S. economy Some special qualities of information goods Three economic sectors give rise to three worlds Trade among the three worlds: winners and losers The emerging new colonialism Information ownership: Intellectual property rights Towards a political economy of information Part II. ICTs and the Internet 8. Expanding market for information economies 9. A hierarchy of access 10. ICT: job creator or destroyer?   It is both As can be expected, the discussants all acknowledged that ICTs were both a creator and a destroyer of jobs, but could not agree which role predominated. A job creator ... and a job destroyer Working at a distance … and managing at a distance Who decides? Whatever is profitable New jobs need new skills, are less secure 11. A poor learning environment Is the expense justified? Building a good learning environment... ... or destroying it? Five senses or abstract symbols? Internet addiction: losing touch with the real world Some suggestions 12. An interactive idiot box Unexplored physical and mental side-effects 13. Drawing resources away from the real problems 14. Private space controlled by rentiers 15. Perverse subsidies Distance-dependent costs Subsidizing international traffic Built-in bias vs. local Biased taxation too 16. Internet cafes: connectivity for the masses? From a 24-hour connection, to access via cybercafes Internet cafes: centers of youth addiction Tricks of seduction Emailing in Internet cafes Browsing with notebooks and diskettes The social divide in a digital world A familiar world of hierarchy Part III. Genetic Information And Genetic Engineering 17. Turning farmers into “pirates” Farmers save the best seeds Saving seeds becomes ‘piracy’ Prosecuting farmers who save seeds Patenting engineered seeds Forcing farmers to shift Superior marketing, not superior seeds Logic of privatization 18. Warning: Terminator seeds 19. Pirating genetic resources Patents on human genetic material Preserving human diversity? 20. Beware of modern vampires 21. Biosafety and genetic contamination Part IV. Monopolistic Information Economies   22. Information monopolies and the WTO Information goods, sectors and economies Low reproduction cost Cyberlords: the rent-seeking class of the information sector WTO: a legal superstructure for cyberlords Retaining the colonial trade pattern High initial costs filter out the poor Low-friction capitalism and the wealth gap A strategy against cyberlords Our future: neo-slaves or free citizens? 23. Globalization: the third wave Our common colonial experience A range of anti-colonial responses The corporate counter-response The second wave of globalization Alert: the third wave is coming A global information economy Information: a closer look Low marginal cost leads to sharing Profit-making mechanism: the monopoly Conflicts within the information economy Internal engine Cyberlords First to third waves: a comparison Super-exploitation Responding to the third globalization wave A Green response Final lesson 24. Cyberlords: rentier class of the information sector Information: low reproduction cost Monopolistic information economies Classes in the information sector The basic conflict A class strategy against monopolies Towards a new social order 25. Testing the political strength of a cyberlord A rent-seeking class Monopolistic practices Expanding its reach Can U.S. Justice defeat the top cyberlord? 26. Globalization: poor design? 27. What could be more important than efficiency? (A critique of efficiency as the main criterion for economic decision-making) Definitions Efficiency and economic theory Critiques of efficiency The social justice critique The ecological sustainability critique A new critique of the efficiency criterion Reliability and failure When efficiency and reliability conflict Is this debate applicable to economics? Improving reliability: the modular approach Modularizing a complex system Modular systems: improving efficiency Dynamic systems are more complex Barriers create modules Complex systems: improving reliability The emergence of gain-maximizers Evolutionary perspectives Shifting our priorities Frugality, cooperation and resource-pooling Part V. Alternatives: A Non-Monopolistic Information Sector 28. A well-kept IT secret Superior to Microsoft Windows Gov’t should use it Schools should use it Easily customizable Why aren’t others using it? The Microsoft anti-Linux document 29. IT or AT? User one-time entry cost Recurring user costs Network server one-time entry costs Recurring network costs Equipment life Cost: conclusion Impact on jobs Local culture Production of equipment Source of information Potential reach Best use Interactivity Advertising Information goods marketing Sensory demands Health issues Accessibility Gate keepers New technologies Default paradigms Government attitude Development agencies attitude NGO attitude Benefits to rich countries Proposed alternate approaches A challenge to governments 30. Community rights over biological material: property or moral rights?   Biological material: private property or “common heritage”? National sovereignty over biological material Back to “common heritage”: socializing privatized material Copyleft: the freedom to use, to share and to modify Free seeds: to give away but not to sell? Learning from the copyrights discussion: moral rights Learning from indigenous peoples’ land rights Monopolistic and non-monopolistic approaches 31. Low-cost strategies for ICT deployment in developing countries   Introduction High start-up costs, near-zero marginal costs Form of income: Information rents ICTs and the Internet: a critique To be connected or not? Cost of entry is a barrier Responding to high costs Appropriate technologies Free/open software A philosophy of freedom Working in harmony with the nature of information Genuine compulsory licensing (GCL) What about hardware? The hardware solution: public facilities, universal access Public ownership of the infrastructure Conclusion 32. Greening the information sector 33. Alternatives to globalization Socialism Green alternatives Fundamentalism The best and the worst Notes: