Information Technology Policy: An International History (review)

As concerns are raised once again about the potential decline of the United States' scientific and technological leadership and its prospective economic impact, it is useful to have some comparative historical context regarding the role and effectiveness of government policy. This is especially true for information technology (IT), which is generally viewed as the essential infrastructure undergirding much of modern economic activity. Information Technology Policy: An International History provides a generous helping of such context. While focusing on the United States and the European Union (both collectively and in terms of individual nations, particularly Britain, France, and the Netherlands), this book also takes pains to broaden its scope by examining developments in Norway, Japan, India, the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Ukraine, and Romania.

One of the many interesting contrasts is between centrally conceived and directed government policies and more distributed policies. From the chapters concerning U.S. government policy toward computing research and development, education and training, and industrial competition, it seems clear that (the views of one author notwithstanding) the United States has never wanted for information technology policy. But that policy has been neither coordinated nor comprehensive. Instead, it has consisted of various departments and agencies undertaking various interventions to further a variety of policy objectives related to IT or to scientific and technical capability generally (some of which actually hurt IT by failing to differentiate it). While certainly not constituting industrial policy on a grand scale, these were most assuredly policies aimed at fostering desired developments (or combating undesired ones) in a particular sphere of activity.

In contrast, most of the policies described in other parts of the book have been centrally established and directed, if not always comprehensive. This latter quality was characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s, as various countries and transnational alliances sought effective responses to the looming hegemony of the United States in general and IBM in particular. (Later, Japan's Fifth Generation program would generate similar kinds of fears in the United States as well.) This search led to grand strategies that often encompassed multiple functional types of policy—import/export, education, intellectual property—and frequently included attempts to restructure industry so as to concentrate strength. This latter phenomenon often took the form of fostering so-called national champions—and in the case of Europe, a European champion. In the wake of substantial underachievement as well as shifting political winds, though, approaches in many countries were subsequently downsized in both scale and scope, generally focusing on some subset of activities, such as R&D, with more circumscribed interventions (e.g., offering inducements to collaborate).

Indeed, one of this book's themes concerns the ways in which both the form and the content of policies have shifted over time in response to myriad influences and changes in circumstance. Cultural imperatives, turf battles within and between government organizations, the needs of users in tension with the needs of producers, corporate agendas, the professional or disciplinary backgrounds of those formulating policy, the relative maturity of industries, national pride, and political exigencies—these are just some of the variables that shape and explain government policies. They emphasize a point made in a number of this volume's case studies: policy has a temporal dimension and must be adaptive, so as to reflect accumulated experience, changed environments, and altered priorities. The relative adaptability of India's IT policy is highlighted, for example, and this chapter and others put forward various high-level models to help understand such adaptations.

One is left with a deep appreciation of the complexities and contingencies of industrial policy in general and of IT policy in particular. What remains ambiguous is how such an appreciation might be translated into more effective policies. By helping us to better grasp the complex milieux in which such policies exist, the contributors to this volume provide an important look backward, even if the path forward is far from clear.