Idealism and the Internet - Marc Weiss

"The Web is in a real way, a manifestation of what we all know -- that we are becoming more and more interdependent as a global family.... Our interest is not only in the power of the Web to hold and exchange information, but in the potential for transaction, for each of us to talk to one another, and trade... knowledge and insights."

Who spoke these idealistic words? Howard Rheingold, the virtual community guru? Stacy Horn, the founder of Echo? Al Gore? None of the above. It was David S. Pottruck, President and Co-CEO of The Charles Schwab Corporation, accepting this year's GII Award for innovation in Web commerce.

It doesn't matter if Pottruck is an idealist or a clear-eyed realist who understands the symbiotic relationship between business interest and public interest on the Web. I believe that companies doing business online not only benefit from, but should vigorously support the visionaries who are working to realize the potential of the Web as a medium which can build relationships and understanding between people.

We're in an interesting industry. While it's true that there are lots of people who've begun working in digital media to make big bucks, there are many more who got involved at least in part for more idealistic reasons. They want to play with this exciting new medium, push it forward and see what it can do.

But if you look at the landscape, money is the Continental Divide of the Web. On one side are literally millions of people who've created their own sites, neither spending money nor expecting to make any. At the other extreme are everything from the startups looking to become the next instant millionaires to the Disneys and Time-Warners and Microsofts who are busily trying to get a piece (as big a piece as possible, of course) of the money machine that the Net is someday supposed to become.

To be sure, there are a few players who care about quality and innovation and substance and are trying to carve out a niche in the vast echoing middle kingdom between the extremes. Some are not-for-profit, some are ostensibly for-profit, even if they're not yet in the black. Webzines like Feed, Word, and Salon. Internet counterparts of old media institutions like PBS Online, the New York Times, Mother Jones and the Utne Reader. You probably have a few of your own favorites to add to the list, but anybody's list is going to be painfully short.

Given how many people came into the field with high ideals, why are so few trying to create a Web presence where values are at least as much a guiding force as the profit motive? Why is there so little work that is as much in the public interest as it is in the self-interest of the home-page publisher on one hand, or managers, investors and stockholders on the other?

Several preconditions are missing. Money is the obvious one. Although the Web is a low-cost medium, developing a Web site of any scale, or maintaining one for any length of time, is hard to do without financial support. There should be multiple sources of funding for public interest Web sites. Unfortunately, at this critical moment in the formative phase of the medium, there are only a handful.

There are two other preconditions missing: public support and what I'd call major player support. First, there needs to be a critical mass of public support for the notion that there should be a vigorous public sector on the Internet. A few years ago, when the new Republican Congress threatened to "defund" public television, tens of thousands of citizens deluged their representatives with messages saying they wanted PBS to continue. Newt retreated. In 1998, just at the moment that the Internet is building a mass constituency, public interest models are becoming less and less visible. In addition, there's no single "villain" (like Newt or the Republicans) to target. The forces at work are as decentralized as the Web itself. So it's unlikely that there will be any mass outpouring of support for a vital "public sector" on the Web, unless it's given some context and some form by activists.

The possibility of major player support is intriguing. There are some companies whose very healthy profits rise directly from the explosive growth of the Internet (and computers in general) over the past few years. There are hardware manufacturers like Cisco, Intel, Compaq, and Dell. There are software companies like Microsoft. And there are companies like Schwab, the discount brokerage firm that handles $2 billion dollars worth of transactions on the Web every week. If those companies alone put aside 1% of their after-tax profits to fund public interest use of the Net, there would be $135 million to work with.

I would argue that it's in their self-interest for those companies to provide that kind of support on a continuing basis. There's an ecology of the Web no less than an ecology of organisms on the planet. Before there was commerce on the Net, there were thousands of micro-organisms (also known as Net heads) experimenting to find its uses. It's always the pioneers, the poets and the prophets who show the way for the rest of us. Far from outliving their usefulness, we need them now more than ever. Public spaces on the Internet are the fertile soil in which new ideas can take root and blossom.

In the early 1960's, before there was a public television, FCC chairman Newton Minnow called TV a "vast wasteland." Let's not stand by and allow the Internet to become a worldwide wasteland.