Social and Economic Technology - 8.2. Funding Secotek
Funding Secotek
The Information Highway is as important as the Physical Highway. It needs to be funded in a similar way.
It is inescapable that what is economic and feasible depends more on government taxation and incentive policy than any technology. The philosophy behind Secotek is to persuade the appropriate powers that it is cost effective to directly adapt technology to fit to the problem, rather than try to transform the problem to suite an inappropriate solution. Investment in Secotek needs to be considered by government as direct support for a service that will boost lifestyle and general employment in rural economies, rather than be a business investment with a hope for direct financial return in some calculated time scale, or a direct return in an identifiable number of extra people employed.
This concept of direct funding for public benefit is not new. Consider the physical highway. Secotek offers itself as a direct improvement to the use of the physical highway in very many practical ways. It proposes the use of the 'information highway' as a direct alternative, with cultural and sociological benefits as well as the more obvious economic ones. The information highway is still regarded as a commercial entity that must directly pay for itself every inch of the way. Yet the physical infrastructure of an area is regarded as a publicly owned commodity which is used as a direct indicator for the type and quantity of business, industry and prosperity. It is considered too essential and too much of a powerful entity than to be trusted to a private concern who could hold the area to ransom. Yet in the present age of business, where information is the all important commodity, it is illogical that the information highway is not regarded in the same way. A very important part of the highway, the software, is allowed to be virtually owned by a single corporation, called Microsoft. Areas not in the mainstream commercial interest of that one American company, (such as rural countryside), are simply not catered for properly by the Highway. It is literally like presenting the physical transport problems associated with farming to a foreign company that specializes in building motorways. A vicious circle exists that, as long as this situation is widely accepted, the highway will never reach its potential, and thus will never have a significant impact on a rural economy. Thus the concept that a rural economy is synonymous with inevitable technological failure, and unworthy of a decent Information Technology investment, perpetuates. Yet it would not be cost prohibitive to correct this problem, and rural areas could become technologically self sufficient. To achieve this is clearly beyond the resources of individuals in the rural community, but compared to the resources being targeted at reviving rural areas it would only be a medium size expenditure. The return on investment in the area could be very, very high. Yet no public body has so far regarded the Information Highway in a rural community for what it is worth, or seems to have understood what to do about it.
Funding for the physical Highway system is extremely complex. Some elements of the transport infrastructure are privately funded. Other elements are publicly funded, but attempts are made to directly recover expenditure with a tax on usage, e.g. fuel tax and tolls for road building. Yet other elements are considered to be so essential they are provided free, and the tax revenue to provide the services are not even considered transport. Examples of this include issues ranging from policing to mowing the verges. Yet the Information Highway has never yet moved, in concept, away from being privately funded with the objective of short term profit for the investors. This forces concentration onto the equivalent of 'Motorways'. The Information Highway now offers more potential to saving a rural economy than the physical infrastructure. However, that potential will never be realized until government takes the issue of all aspects of the information infrastructure as seriously as it does the physical infrastructure.
Actually, there is a very important aspect of the Information Highway that is already not directly privately funded. Education about it, has reached the status of being an essential skill, and this knowledge is, after all, the main precondition for its effective usage. Yet even this is mis-guided. The concept that a highway is an essential commodity to enable other sectors to thrive must be expanded, and costing structures carefully considered in that light. No one would consider charging a rural child per journey to walk from home to the school bus to realistically pay for the maintenance of that stretch of road. Yet irrationally the technological equivalent is most commonly charged in that way.
It is important that funding for an Information Highway be properly targeted. It is very easy to do the equivalent, on the Information Highway, as providing "Rolls Royces" to give to farmers to move about a farm, and expect the economy to pick up from there. Yet the absurdity of doing something like this is not so apparent, and such actions would merely damage all confidence in the technology.
It is also important that safeguards be put that public property remains in the public domain. The mechanism for these safeguards are already available.
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