Information services of all kinds are an important growth sector of the economy. For example, lawyers have an information service called Lexis which is used to locate all cases involving a precedent. In this subsection let us consider just three: (1) information utilities, (2) credit rating services, and (3) airline reservation systems. Medical records for life insurance are pooled into a giant system.
Private information utilities such as Prodigy and CompuServe are commercial services available through your personal computer modem in your home. There are also public domain information services such as Internet. These information utilities offer a wide variety of information services. For example, a partial list of the services offered by CompuServe is: (1) New, Sports, and Weather; (2) Electronic Mail; (3) Reference library; (4) Shopping; (5) Financial Information; (6) Travel &Leisure ; (7) Entertainment and Games; (7) Membership Support Services. These services in such specifics as a brokerages service, an airline/hotel reservation system, shareware software, and member forums using interactive text communication. As a growth industry information utilities must overcome certain problems to reach market saturation such as current TVs. First the systems must be made much more ``used friendly'' to attract a wide audience. In this regard perhaps America Online has gone the farthest with an icon interface(Mac or Windows) so users can point and click. Second, these utilities must keep experimenting to provide a mix of services that households want at a competitive price. Finally, man is a visual animal. As the capacity of the communication system expands the use of dynamic images will greatly increase to provide a visual environment which humans like.
One example is the growth of computerized credit ratings. Currently credit information on almost every household in the US is stored in these systems. Merchants for a fee can rapidly determine the credit rating of a customer. The positive aspect of this development is that it makes our credit oriented consumer markets possible. Without these files it would be a very difficult, time consuming process to obtain credit for an automobile or a house. A basic problem is the accuracy of the files. The industry lobbied and obtained a national law which supersedes common law absolving them from law suits over the accuracy of the data. Over time consumers have obtained the right to examine their files. However, the onus is on the consumer to correct the information in the files. In an extreme case he might have to go to court to have his file corrected. If these firms had of remained under common law, they would have been expected to exercise due care in collecting the data. You could sue them for damages. Under common law, collecting the data would be more expensive; however, there would be many fewer errors in individual records.
Airline reservation systems are another application of computers. The airline reservation system is very interesting because of the conflict of interest. Travel agencies use the airline reservation systems to book flights for customers. The airline developing the system will place its flights first. During the collapse of Braniff, it was alleged that the American airline reservation system showed Braniff flights as always being full. For a truly competitive market, each airline needs equal treatment. Can this be obtained when the airline providing the information service has a conflict of interest? The fact that American sells this service in lessor airlines including the new Braniff indicates that the conflict of interest issues are being at least partially resolved by contract negotiation. A characteristic of the new information systems is that they are capital intensive in hardware and software. The trend is to allow the customer to use the information services through menus and icons without consumer representatives. Help would, however, be available in special cases.