Re: Public key encryption, in

[karn@qualcomm.com (Phil Karn)]

>You left out a few information purchases: education, much of medicine, 
>all of financial services, design, marketing, supervision, and management. 

Indeed. Some years ago I ran into a guy at Newark Airport who was on
his way to Barbados. We struck up a conversation, and it turned out
that he ran a data entry business. He ships documents of various kinds
to Barbados where workers convert them to machine-readable form and
return the tapes. I asked why Barbados. The answer was very simple:
it's about the only English-speaking third-world country in the
western hemisphere with a decent literacy rate (99%, according to my
National Geographic atlas). The economy was bad, and the people were
happy to get the work.

This got me thinking about the impossibility of regulating and taxing
the international transmission of information. At the time I was
thinking more in terms of the impossibility of enforcing US import
duties; who's to say what a particular magtape is worth? If this guy
is still in business I suspect he has long since replaced physical
magtape shipments with electronic transfers, which bypasses Customs
completely.

I suspect there are many other similiar operations, and the trend is
strongly positive.

Phil