How a government could instigate GEMs

The act that launched a GEMs service would need plotting in immense detail to ensure it achieved its desired effect, an outcome that can never be guaranteed. The US Telecommunications Act of 1996, for instance, was intended to open the telephony market to a wide range of sellers but instead encouraged big players to consolidate.53 In the case of GEMs, the aim would be to shape a viable business opportunity for the winning consortium while ensuring benefits of trading technology were spread as widely as possible. Once the official protection for a potential system and its accompanying obligations had been crafted and a winning consortium selected, the goals both of parliament and the consortium would be very similar. In a democracy, both would need the new markets to grow while having every reason to continuously assert their independence from each other. Even in countries where many utilities are state run it would be undesirable for parliament to control a GEMs system: the technology has social implications that puts it on a par with broadcasting rather than water or electricity supply. Furthermore, politicians around the world have proved themselves spectacularly inept at articulating a consistent vision for large computer projects. Past evidence suggests that, once a vision is outlined, it is the private sector that should make it reality. Both sides of the pact should adhere to a fundamental principle of GEMs: taxpayers do not fund the project and no one is ever to be forced to use the system (except in the context of a professional relationship at the behest of an employer). Another absolute is that the launch not be predicated on any attempt to restrict the non-GEMs world of online commerce in any way. There would not, for instance, be a repeat of the French government’s effective outlawing of Teletext to protect a nascent Minitel online service in the 1980s.