The Role of the Information and Communications Technology Sector in Expanding Economic Opportunity

One of the principal reasons is that much has changed in a short time. In the technology sector, 20 years are more like five generations. In the 1980s, "universal access" was a goal, but not the reality, of the legacy PTTs, an acronym for the firms providing "post, telephone, and telegraph" services. Smile, if you wish; the words and services do sound anachronistic. So are the technological and business contexts. The PTTs, comprising much of the ICT sector of their day, were landline-based and, to a large extent, government-owned and -managed. Services were expensive, and in most parts of the world, they had deteriorated to the point where quality could be described as atrocious - ifit had ever been good. Dara network capability was non-existent. Technological innovation, to say nothing of business model innovation, was slow. The name of the game was rent-seeking; that is, extracting every dollar of revenue as possible from sunk-cost infrastructure, and, as a means to that end, suppressing any new, potentially competitive technology, service, or business model, often using the power of the state for that purpose.