We live in the midst of a transition to an age of digital technologies. As in previous large technological transitions, many established interests are threatened and many new ones have arisen. The semiconductor, computer, telecommunications, and software industries (the core information technology industries) have become the political voice of these new interests. Just as innovators like Andrew Carnegie came to symbolize the iron and steel industry in the nineteenth century, and Henry Ford the automobile industry in the early twentieth century, industry figures like Steve Jobs of Apple, Andy Grove of Intel, and Bill Gates of Microsoft represented the spirit of the information age. These new icons of innovation lobbied for policies that were sometimes inconsistent with those favored by older industries, such as textiles, steel, chemicals, and motor vehicles.

Joseph Schumpeter called this displacement resulting from technological change of old interests by new ones “creative destruction.” Older industries, according to Schumpeter, would organize politically to block the institutional changes that accompanied the introduction of new technologies. If these changes were delayed, then a shift in the distribution of political power could also be delayed. But eventually, competitive pressures would overcome the resistance to institutional change and a new distribution of power would emerge to force the old interests to come to terms with the new.

Something of this sort occurred in the debates over high definition television (HDTV) and digital television (DTV) that began in the early 1980s.