The robber barons of the information highway.

• Author: Shenk, Joshua Wolf
• Position: Telecommunications industry claims about interactive communication

Six American kids on a basketball court. They run hard, weaving in and out of one another, and slashing to the basket. "Tres bien," one says to another. "Tres bien."

"Some kids are practicing French outside the classroom," intones the voice of James Earl Jones, "thanks to Bell Atlantic's interactive video distance learning." The ad cuts to a classroom, where a teacher calls out from a television screen at the head of the class: "David! Le chapeau si vous plais!" David, fresh from the basketball court, looks up from his desk confused. "Your hat," says the kid behind him loudly, and they laugh. The teacher's stem visage gives way to a smile. "Merci."

In living, breathing reality, this commercial shows the true potential of "the information superhighway." Maybe those four students live in a rural district. Maybe their school can't afford a full-time teacher's salary. In the world to come, the commercial says, deserving kids will have an easier time finding good teachers. Another Bell Atlantic spot shows doctors working from remote locations - "telemedicine." Still another shows a tiny community on isolated Tangier Island, Virginia. A fisherman talks face-to-face with people in Norfolk ("I can let you have 25 bushels of number-one hog crabs.") In Tangier, too, the kids learn from a teacher on a TV screen:

TEACHER: When you understand the culture, you understand the what? James? JAMES: You understand the people. TEACHER: Good. And what does that help us do? Cara. CARA: Understand each other.

Technology that brings people together and brings out their best: that is the future promised by companies like Bell Atlantic, AT&T, and Time Warner. Their promises matter because it is private investors, not the government, who will finance and build the coaxial cable and fiber-optic "roads" that will make up the superhighway network.

But when I looked for signs of dedication to learning and civic improvement at Bell Atlantic's interactive demonstration project in Arlington, I was disappointed. I was shown a computer screen with the image of a small city, with an elegant town hall, a school, and a hospital. But point and click and ... not much happens. The real action is in the virtual shopping mall - with dozens of catalogues and video games. "Ultimately," insists spokesperson Joan Rasmussen, "there will be communication from house to house and education and all that."

Yet as Congress works on the first major telecommunications bill since 1934, Ramussen's words ring hollow. Telecom reform does have its pitched turf wars - long distance companies like AT&T and MCI, for example, want to keep the Baby Bells out of the long distance business for as long as possible. But the real story is where industry is firmly united: against the two basic concepts that would ensure that the public, not a few huge info-conglomerates, can decide what will be on the information superhighway. The first, known as "common carriage," would require companies to serve everyone for the same price, preventing them from forcing folks they don't like off the roads by spiking prices. The second is known as "open architecture," and it would prevent the private builders from running all the roads through a central hub that they control.

Industry has a very different vision in mind. As Bell Atlantic's demonstration center indicates, the money isn't in schools or health care, but home shopping, movies, and video games. Interactive TV, Bell Atlantic chairman Raymond Smith has said, "will turn us from a nation of couch potatoes into wheeling, dealing video-jocks. Click! Order a pizza. Click! Order a Cindy Crawford video."

And, with thousands of lobbyists on Capitol Hill, industry is winning the argument. Their extraordinary financial clout - telecommunications companies gave Congress $50 million in PAC money from 1984 to 1993, according to Common Cause - combined with poor leadership has pushed the important issues to the side.

"The public interest vision - the potential of this network - has been driven out as a subject for legitimate policy debate," says Andrew Blau, chairman of the Benton Foundation, which works with non-profit groups on telecommunications technology. "The conversation is structured as a horse race between various businesses. There's a hand-waving that goes on, `Oh, don't worry about that. Benefits will flow to everyone.' But there's no evidence that that's the case here."

One of the industry lobbyists' greatest assets is that the public understands so little about what is at stake. American communications has historically been divided up by mediums, each with its monopolies. AT&T ("Ma Bell") controlled all phone service practically from the beginning, until federal courts split the company into a long distance company and smaller "Baby Bells" to provide local service. Cable television is a series of monopolies regulated by local commissions. Cellular communications has two providers in each market.

Recently, though, advances in technology have blurred distinctions among these mediums. With increasing ease, television can be transmitted digitally through telephone wires, telephone service can be delivered by satellites or...