There is no stopping the information revolution.

• Author: Fund, John

IN GEORGE ORWELL's chilling novel, 1984, the state attempts to control citizens through two-way "telescreens" in their homes that bombard them with propaganda and monitor their every move and spoken word. Since the book was published in the 1940s, many people have worried that technology would allow governments unprecedented power over their citizens. Was Orwell a prophet?, they wondered.

We now know that Orwell was wrong, not about the nature of totalitarianism--he was perhaps its sharpest and most vivid critic--but about the role technology would play in the future. In the so-called Information Age, it has proven to be a liberating force.

Technology and the information it conveys directly contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, as Scott Shane documents in Dismantling Utopia: "The new technology turned out to include weapons the citizen could wield against the state as readily as the state could use them on the citizen." Once Pres. Mikhail Gorbachev was compelled to allow citizens access to information, "the forbidden fruit soon swept across Soviet existence, touching every nook of daily life, battering hoary myths and lies, and ultimately eroding the foundations of Soviet power."

New technology also is reshaping and empowering citizens in the Western democracies. Walter Wriston, former chairman of Citibank, argues that "the Information Age is rapidly giving power to the people" and "driving nation-states toward cooperation with each other so that the world's work can get done."

Nowhere is the Information Age having a more profound effect than in the U.S., where the flow of data is more free than anywhere else. American journalists still have a protected status--a kind of diplomatic immunity--courtesy of the First Amendment. While they favor and even agitate for regulation of every other industry, journalists insist that there is no such thing as "reasonable regulation" of the media. Government meddling in the media always makes matters worse, they maintain. It deprives the public of vital information, stifles debate, and intimidates and punishes political enemies.

The fact that journalists regard their freedom as sacrosanct was brought home to me quite forcibly a few years ago, when I addressed a group of colleagues at a national conference. I announced at the beginning of my speech that they should take out their notebooks, because I was going to give them a scoop. I was going to tell them about an industry in their country that...