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Pure Bollocks Issue 22_056
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* C Y B E R S P A C E * A N D * I T ' S *
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L E G A L * I M P L I C A T I O N S *
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This article originally appeared in the Spring, 1991 issue of Whole Earth
Review (issue #70)
Whole Earth Review is a quarterly magazine of access to tools and ideas.
Published by POINT, a California nonprofit corporation. Editorial office: 27
Gate Five Road, Sausalito, CA 94965; 415/332-1716. Subscriptions $20 per year
for individuals, $28 per year for institutions; single copies $7
e-mail: wer@well.sf.ca.us
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Highways of the Mind or Toll Roads Between Information Castles?
By Roger Karraker
Copyright 1991 by POINT and Roger Karraker
This is not an article about technology. It's an article about human needs.
For example:
=> A doctor telecommunicates a CAT scan from her small hospital to the nearest
major medical center.
=> An MIT professor uses his desktop computer in Cambridge to tutor a talented
young physicist on a reservation in rural Montana.
=> Biologists scattered around the world exchange data on an hourly basis,
coordinating their effort to map the human genetic code.
=> A grassroots political organization gets the word out about a meeting, just
in time to mobilize for a municipal legislative session.
=> Each of these activities, science-fiction as they might sound, actually are
happening today, courtesy of computer-mediated telecommunication networks.
The future of this technology is a matter of much behind-the-scenes
maneuvering. Roger Karraker, instructor in journalism and Macintosh at
Santa Rosa Junior College, has teased out the key issues from a politically
and technically complex debate.
Howard Rheingold
**********************************
A quiet but crucial debate now under way in Congress, in major corporate
boardrooms, and in universities, has the potential to shape American in the
21st century and beyond. The outcome may determine where you live, how well
your children are educated, who will blossom and who will wither in a society
where national competitiveness and personal prosperity will likely depend on
access to information.
The battle is about who will build, own, use and pay for the high-speed data
highways of the future and whether their content will be censored. These vast
data highways, capable of sending entire libraries coast-to-coast in a few
seconds or sending crucial CAT scans from a remote village to urban
specialists, could be linked in a vast network of "highways of the mind."
The backbone of these communications networks will be built of fiber optics,
hair-thick strands of glass, transmitting digital pulses thousands of times
faster than ever before. In addition to their speed, fiber optics bring with
them an environmental bonus: fiber optics are made of silicon, the earth's most
common element and the growing use of optical fibers will mean much less demand
for traditional cables composed of copper, an element whose fabrication causes
much environmental damage.
Futurist Alvin Toffler says the future of the United States depends upon the
creation of these networks. "Because so much of business now depends on getting
and sending information, companies around the world have been rushing to link
their employees through electronic networks. These networks form the key
infrastructure of the 21st century, as critical to business success and
national economic development as the railroads were in [Samuel] Morse's era."
These data highways connecting schools, colleges, universities, researchers and
industry could help create high-quality education in the smallest schools, or
start a society-wide revolution as important as the invention of printing.
Conversely, if access to such data networks is restricted to only those who
already have money, power and information then the highways of the mind might
become nothing more than a classic case of economic imperialism, taxation
without communication, that one critic has dubbed "toll roads between
information castles."
Virtually all sides to the controversy agree that such networks are essential.
The future belongs to those who have ready access to huge amounts of accurate
information. The Japanese government and industry are actively building such a
network. The Japanese government estimates that in 20 years 35 percent of
Japan's gross national product will be dependent on information that flows
across this web.
In the United States there is only a vague consensus that this high-
bandwidth network is vital. In place of the unity of purpose evident in Japan,
there is internecine squabbling over who has the right to do what/to where/to
whom.
___________
Four Questions
At issue are vastly different visions of the roles of government, education and
corporations. Four key questions dominate the debate:
1. Who will build the network? (Will the federal government create the
infrastructure or will it be left to private enterprise?)
2. Who will have access to network services? The debate here is between those
who would restrict the network's services to the nation's research leaders
and those who believe in access to anyone with a modem .
3. Who will pay for all this? Everyone concedes that the federal government
will pay the lion's share of getting the network underway. But should it do
so by directly funding the infrastructure or by paying the user fees of
just the big research organizations working on federal projects?
4. What kind of information will be allowed on the network? If the federal
government owns the network, the First Amendment is in place and unpopular
speech and art will be protected. If private enterprise owns and runs the
network, freedom of electronic speech is less clear. Conceivably, a
corporation owning the network could refuse to allow discussion of
controversial topics.
So far, two models or metaphor - "highways" and "railroads" have been proposed
to frame the debate. Both borrow from transportation examples in U.S. history.
Both, I believe, fall short of the mark. And we suggest that a little tweaking
of the two, the best solution for the U.S. might be found in a kind of
synthesis of these different visions.
___________
The Interstate Highway Model
One vision, championed most visibly by U.S. Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.) is to
create a National Research and Education Network (NREN) that will link the
nation's top research, education, corporate and governmental researchers.
Gore's bill to create NREN died in the last Congress but was re-introduced in
January, 1991 with more coordinated support among governmental agencies. The
NREN proposal is just one part of the government's five-year, $2 billion High
Performance Computing Program, which includes supercomputers, software,
networking and education.
Gore speaks of a "catalyst" role for the Federal Government akin to the
creation of the interstate highway system in the 1950s. The interstate
transportation system was seen as a national resource and national tax monies
were used to finance the infrastructure, which benefited all Americans through
more far-flung, decentralized distribution of goods and services.
The highway model - that government recognizes the communications
infrastructure as a vital national resource - is the norm throughout Japan,
Europe and most of the world.
___________
The Railroad Model
IBM, MCI and other private firms prefer a different model: private enterprise
and quasi-monopolies such as America's railroads of the 19th century.
The decision in the 19th century to give private transportation monopolies to
the railroads and let them determine the nation's destiny created the 20th
century landscape of America. Not surprisingly towns and farms accessible to
the railroads prospered and grew. Areas ignored by the railroads withered and
died.
Under the railroad model, the public and the government weren't consulted;
private interest, not national interest, determined who got what. It was pure
free market capitalism with no government regulation, no direct governmental
investment and led to some ugly excesses. Yet at a time when federal budget
deficits approach $300 billion per year the idea of letting private enterprise
foot the whole bill is powerfully attractive.
And that is essentially what IBM, MCI and Merit, an agency of the state of
Michigan have proposed. Last September they formed ANS (Advanced Network
Services), a not-for-profit joint venture that proposes to build and maintain a
private network. But the federal government would need to guarantee that the
research institutions would have annual budgets sufficient to pay their ANS
bills.
___________
Why Decide Now?
The existing national research communication system is woefully inadequate to
today's needs and must be updated soon; this technical obsolescence lends
urgency to the need for finding answers to these policy questions.
The question is how best to modernize and expand the DARPA/Internet network .
It the late 1960s, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA) created a network of telephone lines connected to large research
institutions in government, education, private enterprise and the military to
allow researchers to exchange computerized information.
Over the next decade and a half the number of researchers grew significantly.
As computers grew more powerful and easier to use, researchers outside the
computer sciences began to use remote terminals and telecommunication networks
to exchange messages and share computing resources from their homes, offices,
and laboratories. Each research center supported dozens or hundreds of users,
and each local center was plugged into the overall network; thus, both the
number of nodes in the network and the number of users at each node
proliferated. The number of regional networks in government, business and
education skyrocketed, as did connections to ARPANet's main lines, or
"backbone". Most importantly, the type of data exchanged by researchers changed
dramatically. Where once simple electronic mail messages were sufficient,
collaborators across the nation now needed to exchange high-density data like
sounds, CAT scans, other graphic images, even video images.
By 1987 the ARPANet suffered data gridlock and the last of its 1970s state-of-
the-art lines (56,000 digital "bits" per second - about 50,000 words per
minute) were laid to rest. ARPANet's successor is NSFNET, funded until 1993 by
the National Science Foundation, another government agency. NSFNET's original
lines were so-called T-1 or 1.544 million bits per second - 28 times the
capacity of ARPANet. These lines lasted just three years, and are now being
replaced by a newer T-3 (45 million bits per second) backbone - another 28-fold
increase. No one expects it to last for long.
The growth of the so-called Internet - those machines connected to the NSFNET
backbone - has been phenomenal. In 1989, the number of networks attached to
the NSFNET/Internet increased from 346 to 997; data traffic increased five-
fold. The latest estimate, itself probably wildly out-of-date, is that 100,000
to 200,000 main computers are directly connected to NSFNET, with perhaps a
total of two million individuals able to exchange information.
For example, the WELL, Whole Earth's computer conferencing system, is not
connected directly to either the NSFNET backbone or the so-called Internet of
sites on the backbone. But the WELL's computer is linked to Apple Computer's
mainframes, and to Pacific Bell's computers and to the University of California
at Berkeley - all of them on the Internet. So the WELL's 3,500 customers can
send electronic mail to millions of other computer users around the country
and, via connections between the Internet and other countries, all around the
world.
NSFNET's phenomenal growth in 1989 was, evidently, just a prelude for the data
deluge that is now in full flood. Traffic more than doubled between September
1989 and September 1990. It is projected to double again this year. It won't
take too long to exhaust even those T-3 lines that carry 800+ times the data of
the pre-1987 lines.
That's where the NREN proposal comes in. As proposed by the Coalition for the
National Research and Education Network and championed by Senator Gore,
Congress would authorize the network and provide $400 million over five years
to put it in place. The universities and research centers would pay the
additional costs for the local area networks that would connect their scholars
to the network.
When completed in 1995 the network would have a 3-gigabit backbone - 3 billion
bits per second, a 66-fold increase over the current T-3 capacity, a 50,000-
fold increase over the old ARPA lines. That's about 300 million times faster
than the clattering state-of-the-art teletypes I used at the Associated Press a
quarter-century ago.
___________
From CAT Scans to Instant Encyclopedias
What can you do with 3 billion bits per second? The NREN Coalition likens it to
sending 100 three-dimensional x-rays and CAT scans every second for 100 cancer
patients, or sending 1,000 satellite photographs to researchers investigating
agricultural productivity, environmental pollution or weather prediction.
Reduced to just words, it would be 100,000 typed pages per second, or as the
Coalition dangles tantalizingly before us, "making it possible to transmit the
entire Encyclopedia Brittanica in a second...."
Now before you begin salivating at the thought of every book, every magazine
article available instantaneously at your slightest whim, here's the rub: as
currently designed, NREN's 3-gigabit data lines aren't coming to your house, or
your kids' school, even your local library. NREN will connect only the largest
research universities and consortia, at least one in every state. From there,
lower-speed regional networks would connect nearby institutions. At the bottom
of NREN's proposed three-tier system would be local campus networks. There's no
plan or provision for K-12 schools or local libraries in the NREN proposal.
One doesn't need the vast capacity of NREN to exchange simple electronic mail.
There are many alternative, if slower, networks available. Using super-
sophisticated NREN for such mundane tasks might be like trying to get a drink
out of a fire hose. And it's problematic whether local schools and libraries
would be able to pay for the equipment needed to exchange items much more
complex than simple electronic mail. There's the potential here for the
creation of information haves and information have-nots. As Apple Computer
librarian Steve Cisler puts it, "If this is going to be a data superhighway,
how would you like to have to go to a computer company, military base, or
university to find an onramp?"
Dave Hughes, a Colorado telecommunications pioneer, takes a more cautious view
of the slimmed-down NREN that Gore and others are trying to push through
Congress. An ex-Army colonel and former aide to Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara, Hughes believes that NREN's plan, with local schools not even
mentioned, could perpetuate educational elitism, where the already-prosperous
research universities get additional taxpayer-paid subsidized service and the
already-poor local schools get short shrift.
Which doesn't mean that Dave Hughes doesn't want to see a high-speed data
network. To the contrary, he wants it to reach every corner of America,
terminating in at least each of the 16,000 local school districts. Such as the
114 one-room school houses in Montana which he and Frank Odasz of Western
Montana College have managed to connect up, after a fashion, through their Big
Sky Telegraph system, and and from there out to the rest of the world. And over
which a theoretical physicist from MIT has been able to teach a course in chaos
theory mathematics to students in these schools - which the physicist cannot do
through the Internet workstation on his MIT desk, Hughes says. Hughes and Odasz
already have created a grassroots online culture in the wide-open spaces where
physical isolation reinforces the lack of ready access to national sources of
information.
Hughes wants either to flatten NREN's three tiers of service into a single
tier, or have guarantees of affordable access and compatible protocols between
the three tiers to and from every educational/political subdivision in America.
From observing online behavior nationally for the past 11 years, he thinks
talent will find its own level on the network, and that those with neither the
talent or motivation will be satisfied with local bulletin-boards and video
games. He believes all schools in the country should have the right of access
under the law, including either affordable rates, or appropriate subsidies down
to the local level.
"The implicit assumptions behind the NREN proposal," Hughes says, "are that it
will only link large research (which also may be 'educational' in the sense of
higher education) institutions. As currently conceived NREN will NOT extend to
the 16,000 K-12 school districts in America, much less foster the vision of a
nation of people learning all their lives by mixing institutional (edifice-
centered) education and training, and learning, formally and informally, from
home, library, place of business or study.
"So the metaphor of the need for 'Highways of the Mind' across this land is
very deceptive. It really could turn out to mean 'Super Toll Roads between
Castles.' That is not my vision of a Network Nation."
___________
The Network Nation
What would a real Network Nation be like? Conservative theorist/author George
Gilder, like Hughes, foresees a renaissance in education caused by the
"telecomputer": the merger of fiber optic telephone service to the home and new
ultra-powerful multimedia computers.
"The telecomputer could revitalize public education by bringing the best
teachers in the country to classrooms everywhere," Gilder says. "More
important, the telecomputer could encourage competition because it could make
home schooling both feasible and attractive. To learn social skills,
neighborhood children could gather in micro-schools run by parents, churches or
other local institutions. The competition of home schooling would either
destroy the public school system or force it to become competitive with rival
systems..."
High-speed data communications to the home might also revolutionize where and
how we live. Data communications could allow rural tele-commuting, ending two
centuries of "brain drain" from the countryside to the cities.
Gilder says, "Every morning millions of commuters across America sit in cars
inching their way toward cluttered, polluted and crime-ridden cities," he says.
"Or they sit in dilapidated trains rattling toward office towers that survive
as business centers chiefly because of their superior access to the global
network of computers and telecommunications. With telecomputers in every home
attached to global fiber network, why would anyone commute? People would be
able to see the boss life-size in high-definition video and meet with him as
easily at home as at the office. They would be able to reach with equal
immediacy the head of the foreign subsidiary or the marketing chief across the
country. They would be able to send and receive documents almost instantly from
anywhere."
___________
Who Pays the Bill?
Whether it's the $400 million Gore's NREN bill calls for or the untold billions
required for fiber optics to the home, high-speed data communications will cost
a bundle and the major political battle is over who will pay.
For Gilder and for many of us who hope to benefit from fiber-to-the home, the
answer is clear: let the local telephone companies install fiber to every home,
amortize the cost and add it to our monthly telephone bills.
To consumer groups and many state public utilities commissions that reeks of
reverse Robin Hood-ism: stealing from the poor, retired and elderly who may
never be able to utilize the capabilities of the new system in order to
subsidize the corporations, universities and a well-educated few. Indeed,
that's already underway. Much of the U.S. telephone system, especially in the
central cities and along corporate "data corridors" has already been converted
to fiber optic service and the costs rolled into the local telephone rate.
Another option: last September IBM and MCI, who already operate NSFNET under
contract, proposed to build a "private Internet" backbone that would require
less governmental funding, but would involve user fees. Advanced Network
Services, the IBM/MCI non-profit joint venture, would build and operate the
network.
The benefit, as IBM exec Allan H. Weis, president/chief executive officer of
ANS puts it, is ""Because we are broadening the community of those using the
network, the fixed costs of national networking will be more widely
distributed. This will free up funds which could then be allocated to assist
the neediest organizations to connect to the national network, as well as to
continue to support and enable the national network to remain in the vanguard
of new technology."
That doesn't sit well with Dave Hughes. "With this Administration, the budget
crunch, and general ignorance of the implications, I'm afraid that the decision
makers - including Congress - will welcome 'private enterprise' with open
arms. And overlook such minor details as 'equal access.' No, it will be 'if you
got the bucks you can buy it.' Kiss off the idea that all K-12 schools will
have 'educational' access."
Mitch Kapor, the co-founder of Lotus Computing and the president of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, also believes that universal access should be a
central tenet of any national network policy.
"Whatever infrastructure we create," Kapor says, "should incorporate a notion
of 'universal digital service', much as AT&T pioneered, and which later became
national policy, with respect to voice telephony in the early 20th century.
Everyone should be able to connect to the net."
Hughes and Kapor approach the NREN controversy from substantially different
perspectives. Hughes is suspicious of turning the nation's infrastructure over
to the agendas of private enterprise.
As Hughes terms it, "I am concerned about the U.S. mind-set which, without
thinking, says that the 'private sector' should provide telecommunications in
the U.S. simply because that is the way it always has been, while in a couple
other key areas - sewage, highways, and education - that is not the case.
"If we believe so mightily that our national future is very much wrapped up in
computing and telecommunications - and that especially 'research and education'
are going to have to be improved mightily for us to compete - then we ought to
be thinking a lot more carefully than we are now about which portion of
telecommunications should be government provided/subsidized/regulated and which
portion pure profit-and-loss commercial."
Kapor, one of the country's most respected entrepreneurs, suggests that one way
to satisfy both Big Scientists and Universalists is to have, in effect, two
networks, achieved by "overlaying" lower-bandwidth networks onto an NREN-like
backbone.
"These high-end and low-end visions of the NREN are strikingly different. There
is no assurance that one size network fits all. Some important public policy
choices will therefore be made, one way or the other," he says.
While he lauds the IBM/MCI/ANS group for its donations of millions of dollars
to NSFNET computing, Kapor is concerned that ANS policies may become, by
default, national polices concerning telecommunications without the benefit of
public debate. ANS, he says, is already establishing policies for measuring
network traffic, billing and accounting, and setting access charges for new
information entrepreneurs, all without the normal hearing and rule-setting
process required of public utilities.
"What ANS does in the way of setting up commercial access to the national
information infrastructure may well become, in effect, national policy," Kapor
says. "But there is no guarantee of public accountability.
"We are dependent on the continued good will of ANS in setting its policies. We
don't know, for instance, whether the technology for counting traffic on the
net that ANS develops will be as enabling for would-be information
entrepreneurs as it will for big corporate information providers. Without an
open public process for getting input in the development of the net, the
resulting choices are less likely to be in the public interest."
Kapor also sees that a purely private enterprise such as ANS may not be fully
in consonance with the goals of Electronic Frontier Foundation's goals,
including First Amendment guarantees for electronic speech and guaranteed
access to communications services at fair prices.
EFF's recent newsletter noted that Prodigy, a national computer communications
system half owned by IBM, has been embroiled in disputes because of its policy
of reading and censoring postings made to Prodigy's public forums.
"I believe it's important to establish the legal principle that businesses
which offer a network service which is principally that of a conduit - moving
bits from here to there - may not restrict the content of the information they
carry. The ability to restrict content, whether conducted by the government in
the form of censorship, or by a private carrier for whatever reason, is not
conducive to the free and open flow of information," he says.
___________
So What' the Answer?
Now let's play Chinese menu, taking a few items from column A (Gore's NREN/Big
Scientists bill) and column B (the Universalists approach).
A workable national network might include the following features:
=> Built and managed by private enterprise
=> Federal start-up subsidies for colleges, universities, libraries and
schools
=> First Amendment free speech guarantees
=> Guaranteed interconnection to other data services offered by telephone
companies and other locally regulated businesses
=> Guaranteed universal digital access for everyone who wants to connect
=> Fair rates and policies subject to regulatory review
In short, we'd have a regulated public utility: precisely the system that the
U.S. used over the past century to develop the best - and cheapest - public
telephone system in the world.
The problem, as usual, is in how one defines the purpose of the national
network. Laura Breeden, a network group manager at Bolt Beranek and Newman (a
private research and development company that was one of the original ARPAnet
contractors), frames the issues this way:
"If you think of data networking as a public utility, then it seems important
to regulate it in some of the same ways that other utilities are regulated,
i.e. to make sure that basic services are provided to everyone and not
withdrawn unreasonably.
"If you think of it as a strategic resource, important for insuring
U.S.competitiveness and technological progress, then you put it where it can do
the most good strategically .
"If you believe that it is important to education generally, then you put it at
as many schools as possible.
"If you think data networking is some of all of these, you have to balance the
trade-offs among them."
The National Network is a complex issue. It's safe to say only a handful of
representatives understand the issue in depth. A letter from you to your
elected representatives asking for reasonable rates, guaranteed free speech
rights and access for local schools, libraries and homes might make a lot of
difference.
____________
For more information concerning NREN, consult the following sources:
The WELL, Whole Earth's computer conferencing system, has extensive coverage of
NREN/Internet issues the Info, Telecommunications and Electronic Frontier
Foundation conferences. Call 415/332-4335 (voice) or 415/332-6106 (modem) for
more information on how to join the WELL. On the WELL you will find: Dave
Hughes (dave@well.sf.ca.us), Steve Cisler (sac@well.sf.ca.us), Tom Valovic
(tvacorn@well.sf.ca.us), Mitch Kapor (mkapor@well.sf.ca.us), and Roger Karraker
(roger@well.sf.ca.us)
Mike Nelson, Senate Commerce Committee, U.S. Capitol, Washington, DC 20510;
202/224-9360.
Sen. Albert Gore, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC 20510 (Gore's office, or the
Senate Commerce Committee, can send you a copy of Gore's article, "Networking
the Future," published in the July 15, 1990 Outlook section of the Washington
Post .
Coalition for the National Research and Education Network: Mike Roberts, Vice
President/Networking, EDUCOM, 1112 16th Street NW, #600, Washington, DC 20036;
roberts@educom.edu
Research & Education Networking , a commercial publication devoted to
developments related to NREN, is published nine times a year. Volume I, Number
1 is eight pages long. Institutional rate is $59 annually; personal rate is
$39. Available from Meckler, 11 Ferry Lane West, Westport, CT 06880; 203/226-
6967; Fax 203/454-5840
This version of this document was prepared by Matisse Enzer,
matisse@well.sf.ca.us; 415/647-4324 This version was prepared by taking the
ASCII version of Roger Karraker's original submittal to Whole Earth Review and
manually bringing it into line with the published version. Any errors in that
process are the sole responsibility of myself, Matisse Enzer.
