Might it be as LS says above that the state has grown addicted to the Internet?
It struck me when I was in the tax office in my city in Japan today waiting around, how everything in the whole office - every pen, stamp, printer, monitor, light bulb, ticket dispenser, desk, chair, escalator, and piece of paper - was the product of a private company, most bearing logos: NEC, Epson, BIC, Sharp, Infrontia, etc.
I was looking around in vain for any product the state made itself. I finally thought of one: tap water. But really, the Japanese government uses all sorts of equipment in collecting, testing, purifying, chlorinating, and delivering the water, and probably all of that equipment is from private companies. Isn’t the government’s inability to make any product themselves the very best illustration of the lesson of I, Pencil?
In a similar vein, it seems that the state may not be able to ween itself off the incredible efficiency of services on the Internet. Search engines like Google may already be indispensible for a wide variety of government operations. Maybe there are a whole lot more sites like this, and although services are in some sense “easier” than products and the government already provides a lot of services, maybe there is an argument to be made in the spirit of I, Pencil. Whereas the essay takes about the physical products and processes needed to create a pencil, perhaps a similar argument can be made for services. Perhaps the free Internet will, or already has, made some services so much cheaper and better that the state simply can’t afford to shut it down or censor it very much. But then again, they can’t really afford to interfere with the market as much as they do; if they left things alone for a while they’d have far more tax revenue eventually as technology and production skyrocketed.
In any case, I’d like to see LS make the argument above in greater detail.
