Saturday, June 13, 2009

The Decline of Intermediaries?

Yesterday I commented on a OSTP blog post asking about how to improve "public" participation in rulemaking. It's part of a bigger effort by the Obama administration to be open and elicit input on various e-government issues. It stimulated a chain of thought on intermediary institutions.

Today newspapers are in trouble. Consider them as intermediaries which gather news, vet and authenticate it, and provide it to individuals. Along with the news comes ads, which pay the freight. But now the Internet is allowing individuals to get their own news more directly and newspapers suffer.

Consider "interest groups", people like the Farm Bureau, the Corn Growers, the Sustainable Agriculture people, groups large and small. One way to look at them is as intermediaries: they search out news, they identify concerns of their members, they carry the concerns to Congress and the executive branch, they give news to their members. Suppose Obama (or his successors) succeed in adapting Web 2.0 to make strong connections between the public, or subsets of the public with their own hot issues, and the government, or subsets of the government concerned with writing laws and implementing them. What happens to the intermediaries?

Do we possibly have an arms race, a competition between private interest groups and public institutions to serve citizens?

Consider IRS. Back in the day tax returns were simple. As they grew more complicated people like H&R Block developed into intermediaries between taxpayer and IRS. As PC's came along we started getting software packages which allow the individual to do tax returns. And now IRS has its own software to do returns.

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