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Building The Open Road:
Policies for the National Public Network


Mitchell Kapor
Electronic Frontier Foundation
April 29, 1991
[e-mail]
[phone]


A debate has begun about the future of America's
communications system. At stake is the future of the web
of information links organically evolving from computer
and telephone systems, the nervous system of America.  By
the end of the next decade, these links will connect
nearly all homes and businesses in the U.S. They will
serve as the main channels for commerce, learning,
education, and entertainment in our society.

Today the tools for creating and distributing text,
images, sounds and moving pictures are becoming
increasingly affordable. Soon they will be as ubiquitous
as the typewriter and mimeograph were for a previous
generation.   Some aspects of the future technology are
self-evident: the sort of "multimedia" available at theme
parks today will be delivered to the living room
tomorrow.  Telecommuters will pursue their livelihoods
via electronic links, while students and learners of all
ages will educate themselves through online contacts with
teachers and each other.  People will "meet" and build
friendships within "virtual communities" defined by
common interests and values rather than by the
constraints of physical location and the costs of travel.

The new technologies of computer networks and
telecommunications have already begun to transform all
aspects of society, much as the printing press did some
five hundred years ago.  It is urgent that we, as
citizens, begin to understand the changes these
technologies will inevitably bring.  It is imperative
that we shape them to our individual needs and to those
of society.

Although the ultimate system is years, or more likely
decades  away, several prototypes are operating now in
embryonic form.  Each is growing with the frenetic speed
of an infant medium. Each offers valuable lessons, both
positive and negative, about the design of the future
network and its services.

Chief among these systems is the wide-ranging "Internet,"
a non-commercial government-initiated computer network
used by over a million researchers and educators.  We
also find Usenet, a completely decentralized conferencing
system which runs over the Internet and beyond it
carrying thousands of newsgroups.  There are a double
handful of commercial personal computer networks ranging
from mass-market oriented services like  CompuServe and
Prodigy to smaller, regional computer conferencing
systems like the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (the WELL).
Finally, out on the fringe is a turbulent mass of
uncounted (probably tens of thousands) non-commercial
computer bulletin board systems with their millions of
users. Many of these are linked in a network called
Fidonet.

The technical pressure to fully interconnect all of these
systems is enormous, so much so that most experts
casually speak of a single, comprehensive network linking
everyone and everything, as if the plans for such a
network were a fait accompli.   But most of the
fundamental social questions are still unanswered.  What
will that meta-network be like?  Who will build,
maintain, and control it?  What will it be good for?

Today's computer networks, with the exception of the
Internet and some of the commercial networks, rely on the
public switched telephone network --  usually called
"POTS" , for 'plain old telephone service' -- to
communicate.  But POTS, as adequate as it is for the
voice conversations for which it was designed, is highly
inadequate for transmitting any form of digital data.  It
is too slow, too noisy and too lacking in the  capacity
and responsiveness necessary to serve as the America's
nervous system.

So POTS will have to go.  But  what will replace it?
Lately, in parts of the telecommunication industry it has
become fashionable to advocate "fiber to the home", by
which is meant replacing millions of miles of copper
telephone cables in residential neighborhoods with high-
capacity fiber optic cable.  Estimates of the total cost
start at $200 billion and go up.   As big as $200 billion
may seem to us,  the capital investment is increasingly
being seen by industry as a reasonable investment -- at
least if it is made over 10 to 15 years.  Both the
telephone and cable television industries are logical
candidates to bring fiber to the home.  Both industries
wish to be free from regulations which constrain them (in
different ways) from the unlimited offering of emerging
video entertainment services from which they expect to
make billions of dollars.

If history is any guide this "bold new medium of fiber to
the home" could simply result in a thousand more channels
of home shopping, televangelism, and reruns of "Green
Acres".  However profitable for its suppliers and
distributors, it would be nothing more than the next
disappointment in a long series of technological marvels
--  including television itself --  that failed to live
up to the high expectations of their original proponents.

Today, we risk being sold a bill of goods :  extravagant
promises about the potential benefits of a national
network followed by an inevitable disappointment in the
result.  In the absence of any proven consumer demand
beyond mass-market entertainment, we must rely on vision
and intuition in the design of the network, not the
promises of corporate giants.  In its heart, the new
network wants to become something grander: a National
Public Network, drawing its inspiration from the
universal telephone service that we enjoy today and the
immense richness and diversity of the printed word and
image.

At its best, the National Public Network would be the
source of immense social benefits. As a means of
increasing social cohesiveness, while retaining the
diversity that is an American strength, the network could
help revitalize this country's business and culture. It
will increase the amount of individual participation in
common enterprise and politics. And it could galvanize a
new set of relationships --  business and personal --
between Americans and the rest of the world.

A network that is responsive to a wide spectrum of human
needs will not evolve by default.  Just as it is
necessary for an architect to know how to make a home
suitable for human habitation, it is necessary to
consider how humans will actually use the network in
order to design it.

Unfortunately, in today's world human needs and technical
details are seldom considered together.  Anyone who has
been brave enough to venture into computer networks
knows how incomprehensible the commands and interface can
be.  This situation is common in the early years of any
new technology.  Before the advent of the self-starter,
automatic transmissions, and the modern highway system,
automobiles were a lot harder to drive too.  But the
problems with computer networks are too rooted and
intractable for the mere passage of time to cure.  They
stem from the separation between technically trained
people and ordinary users.

Technically trained people are not troglodytes; they
approve of human-oriented design, even as they manage to
use the network today without it.  For years, leaders
within the Internet community have been taking steps to
improve ease of use on the network.  But the training of
the technical community as a whole has given them little
practice making their digital artifacts appropriate for
non-technical consumption.  Nor are they often rewarded
for doing so.  To a phone company engineer designing a
new high-speed telephone switch, or to a computer
scientist  pushing the limits of a data compression
algorithm, the notion of making electronic mail as simple
as fax machine may make sense, but it also feels like
someone else's job.  Being technically minded themselves,
they feel comfortable with the specialized software they
use and seldom empathize with the neophyte.  The result
is a proliferation of arcane, clumsy tools in both
hardware and software, defended by the cognoscenti: "I
use the `vi' editor all the time -- why would anyone have
trouble with it?"

More than the design for the National Public Network
itself, we need to plan the actual process of design.
We need to be talking about the general floor plan, not
the strength of the beams and joists.   To  do this we
must nurture a diverse ecology of participants, who
together will evolve the National Public Network to its
fullest potential. That means including all concerned
parties in the deliberations -- engineers, educators,
telephone companies, information providers, commercial
enterprises, government agencies, scientists, artists,
consumers, readers, entrepreneurs, computer software
designers, writers, and members of the general public.

One of the first tasks will be articulating values.  The
personal computer industry which I helped found was not
just propelled by invention but by a drive to  create
intellectual tools to aid productivity and reduce
mindless drudgery.   Similarly, it is terribly important
to develop shared ideas about the basic purposes and
value of computer networks. Any decisions made now will
materially affect the network's structure.  There will be
no chance to redo them later. Right at the start, we
should be asking not only what a National Public Network
can do, but what sorts of things should it do -- and
then, how can we best help it evolve?



This Year's Urgency

If any single event has given urgency to the debate over
our communications system recently, it's the current
proposal for a National Research and Education Network
(NREN, pronounced "en-ren"). The NREN is, in effect, a
formal reshaping of the "Internet" -- the decentralized,
anarchic web of computers and electronic mailboxes,
linking major universities and industrial research labs
around the world. A measure of how seriously the NREN is
regarded is that its proponents have chosen to rename
the Internet as "the interim NREN".

The Internet was created in 1969 by the Department of
Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (in whose
honor it was called the ARPAnet), to help scientists
share far-flung computers at high speeds. Gradually, it
evolved its own unique set of applications, including
file transfer, remote log-in and most notably, a complex
and heavily-used electronic mail system linking millions
of users.  Many of these users are unaware of the very
existence of the Internet and, in fact, are situated on
separate, but linked networks, much like a chain of
islands connected by bridges.  The federal subsidy of the
non-agency, non-military portions of the  Internet, has
been carried on by the National Science Foundation and
the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA).  This funding, scheduled to end in 1992,
has primed the pump for the creation of the first
national network.  However it is  the efforts and support
of dedicated volunteers in academia and in private sector
technology companies which keep the Internet going.
These contributions in aggregate are worth far more than
the total federal subsidy.

Despite its lack of centralized control (some would say
because of it), the Internet and its  mail system have
become a significant underpinning for the American
research community, as well as a living laboratory for
studying how people telecommunicate. Hundreds of
thousands of people take part in its public mailing lists
and "newsgroups" which contain discussions whose topics
have expanded from programming languages and mathematical
theory to gossip, politics, sex, science fiction, and pop
music.   The technical cognoscenti use a system service
called FTP, which stands for File Transfer Protocol, to
gain access to uncounted hundreds of thousands of
documents, images, and computer programs stored in
thousands of digital repositories scattered around the
world.  The FTP archive is a forerunner of tomorrow's
"digital library system" which would make the full
contents of our libraries instantly available  in our
homes, offices, and schools.

Ironically, one of the principal problems of FTP is that
cataloging of materials has not kept pace with the
voluminous masses of material deposited.  It's like a
gigantic library with no card catalog.  Materials can be
found only by hearing about them through word of mouth or
conducting an exhausting  "virtual" shelf search.  At
this writing, powerful indexing and retrieving tools are
just beginning to appear in prototype form.  They will
automatically look across multiple repositories for
documents of interest which are specified through
extremely simple search requests.

The Internet, which began as an experimental environment,
has become a communications highway supporting many
different kinds of traffic.   It stands on the threshold
of commercialization.  There is growing interest and
pressure to use it to publish newsletters and journals,
provide access to commercial  information databases and
advertising, and to distribute commercial  software.
Computer companies already understand how full access to
the Internet can enable them to get closer to their
customers and suppliers in order to make their business
more competitive.

NSF administrators and other government officials, who
recognize that they are not managers of a commercial
network, now face the delicate task of orchestrating a
transition to private sector operation and enabling
commercial traffic  on the Internet. They must also meet
two other objectives:  preserving and expanding the use
of the Internet by its original users (the academic
research community)  and charting the future directions
of research into higher-capacity broadband networks.
While the switches and conduits which comprise the
technology of today's network can be developed and
proferred more efficiently by competitive private sector
firms, intensive research efforts are required to develop
the transmission and switching protocols which will
eventually support "fiber to the home".   Trying to use
today's data-sifting methods with the extremely high-
capacity fiber optic cable would be like trying to catch
a drink from a fire hydrant with a paper cup.

There are other reasons the NSF is in an uneasy position.
Some network sites have been used to store "offensive" or
"pornographic" images which are then FTP'd across the
net.   Pressure has been brought to bear upon the
administrators of these sites, typically in universities,
to remove the materials.  This in turn has brought down a
great deal of criticism on the NSF for censorship.  While
an administrator  may personally approve of unrestrained
freedom of speech, he also knows that the network depends
on federal money and worries that a Senator might someday
decide to ride a "government-subsidized pornography"
hobby horse and crusade to cut off the Internet's funds.
Privatization represents a way out of this dilemma.

Senator Albert Gore formally proposed the NREN for the
second time in a bill brought before Congress this year,
for which hearings were begun in March. President Bush
implicitly endorsed the NREN in his 1991 budget.   It
appears increasingly likely that hundreds of millions
will be committed to the project.  Each federal dollar is
likely to be matched with ten or more private sector
dollars, as companies such as IBM and MCI  continue to
invest in research for the same user community.  This
leverages the federal investment enormously.  But there
are fundamental ambiguities about the purposes to which
those funds will be put.

On the one hand, the "R" and the "E" of NREN themselves
imply a commitment to the research and education
communities before all other users.   There is
considerable tension between some who want to use the
money to build very high-speed networks which will
provide scientists with access to national supercomputer
sites  and others who want to  put more libraries and
schools on the net.   To do both is in some degree
possible, but if clear choices are not made and
maintained, there is a danger of achieving not much of
anything except fragmented results with inadequate funds.

Furthermore, the language of the Gore bill itself, makes
it clearly understood that the NREN is the prototype for
a national network   available to everyone and supporting
commercial use.  How much of this is permitted or
encouraged and how rapidly it happens is unknown.  Thus,
the NREN has gathered attention from every part of the
telecommunications and computer community, as well as the
higher education and library communities.

If, as expected, the NSF drops its direct subsidies of
network facilities, will it offer grants instead to
universities and institutions so they can purchase
network services? How widespread will this support be?
Will it create tension between have and have-nots on
campus, or will network access be available at a low
enough cost that any qualified researcher can afford it?
What about non-university students or independent
scholars? Should NREN, as computer networking pioneer
Dave Hughes suggests, expand to connect every K-through-
12 classroom in the country? Or if it only reaches some
schools, how will those be chosen?

It is a misconception to think that the NREN will be
constructed wholly from scratch.  It will build upon and
eventually incorporate today's Internet.  It will further
accelerate and expand ongoing research in broadband
networks, the kind capable of delivering interactive, on-
demand video to the home.

Today's six "gigabit testbed" experiments represent the
seed stage of the NREN.  Each of these systems is managed
by a different consortium of academic institutions
(including MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie-Mellon) and
industrial firms, particularly  telephone and computer
companies (IBM, MCI, AT&T, and the regional Bell
companies). Because so much private money is already
being committed, even if the NREN never passed,  the
necessary research for wide-spread deployment will
probably be completed  anyway. At least one prototype
network will probably be deployed nationwide as early as
1994. If so, the research and education community will
face a new set of questions. How rapidly will this new
type of service be available, both inside and outside the
research community? If a private company is the vendor of
this new service, will its competitors be given access to
it? Will network access become a commodity, sold and
traded on the same basis as computer services?

 Meanwhile, telephone companies continue to push at the
limits imposed on them by the "Modification of Final
Judgment" (MFJ) of divestiture, the 1982 anti-trust
agreement which split up the Bell system. The phone
companies make an increasingly persuasive case that they
should be allowed to offer information services --
despite the resulting competitive tension between the
telephone companies, cable TV carriers, and newspapers.
Thus, in the next year or so, Congress may well
reluctantly decide to define a new set of rules for
regulated telecommunications . Like the AT&T divestiture
decision, this would represent a fundamental shift in
national policy with enormous and unpredictable
consequences.   By redefining the endeavors which phone
companies can and cannot pursue, the deck of potential
participants in the National Public Network would be
reshuffled.

While the protagonists in all of these dramas are aware
of each other, for the most part they do not recognize
their endeavors as part of the same overall effort.
Commercial firms are preoccupied with the underlying
technology and with their legal rights.  Telephone
companies find it extremely difficult to overcome the
mindset developed in the era in which they controlled a
centralized, regulated monopoly.  Strategic planners in
the telecommunications industry are seemingly unaware of
the The Internet or discount the relevance of its
million-person user community.  The Internet's
engineering community meanwhile has much to offer on
technical standards, where they have long-standing
experience, but limited ability to empathize with how
ordinary citizens might meaningfully take advantage of
networks in their own lives.

The privatization of the Internet runs the risk of
creating the same balkanized universe of unconnected
island networks as existed in the telephone system prior
to the emergence of the old regulated AT&T monopoly.  It
would be tragedy if ignorance were responsible for
overlooking valuable lessons in the history of telephony.

Finally, new visions are coming from individuals who have
already been educated by their use of these tools:
veterans of personal computers and computer networks, who
are coming forward because they don't want their needs to
be ignored in the eventual full-scale system.


Visions and Realities of the Net

Some people have offered their visions of what the
National Public Network could offer people. Senator
Gore's bill mandates that federal agencies will serve as
information providers, side by side with commercial
services, making (for instance) government-created
information available to the public over the network.
Individuals will gain "access to supercomputers, computer
data bases, other research facilities, and libraries."
(Gore imagines junior high school students dialing in to
the Library of Congress to look up facts for a term
paper.)  Apple CEO John Sculley has predicted that
"knowledge navigators" will use personal computers to
travel through realms of virtual information via public
digital networks.

Such visions are powerful, but they  sometimes seem too
much like sales tools; too vague and overconfident to set
direction for research. People often infer from the
Apple's "knowledge navigator" videotape, for instance,
that human-equivalent computer speech recognition is just
around the corner; but in truth, it still requires
fundamental research breakthroughs. Network users will
still need keyboards or pushbuttons for many years. Nor
will the network be able (as some have suggested) to
translate automatically between languages. (It will allow
translators to work more effectively, posting their work
online.)

Even the benign idea of linking schools to the net will
be no panacea, for the problems of America's public
education system are far deeper than anything a quick
techno-fix might provide.  Until there is a compelling
vision of education reform which stands on its own,
providing more technology is not an answer, but a
distraction.   The average classroom teacher is already
overburdened without having to confront a hostile
technology he or she doesn't understand and has no time
to learn.  A radical educational reform would involve
extensive use of technology, but the commitment to
fundamental change must precede and shape the employment
of computers and networks, not vice versa.

To what uses can we reasonably expect people to use a
National Public Network? We don't know. Indeed, we
probably can't know -- the users of the network will
surprise us . That's exactly what happened in the early
days of the personal computer industry, when the first
spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, spurred sales of the Apple
][ computer. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
did not design the spreadsheet; they did not even
conceive of it. They created a platform which allowed
someone else to bring the spreadsheet into being, and all
the parties profited as a result including the users.

We can however make a few educated guesses, based on
today's systems, about the National Public Network. We
know that, like the telephone, it will serve both
business and recreation needs, as well as offering
crucial community services like fire alarms. Messaging
will be popular: time and time again, from the ARPAnet to
Prodigy, people have surprised network planners with
their eagerness to exchange mail. "Mail" will not just
mean voice and text, but also pictures and video -- no
doubt with many new variations. One might imagine two
people poring over a manuscript from opposite ends of the
country, marking it up simultaneously and seeing each
others' markings appear on the screen.

We know from past demand that the network will be used
for electronic assembly -- virtual town halls, village
greens, and coffee houses, again taking place not just
through shared text (as in today's computer networks),
but with multi-media transmissions, including images,
voice, and video. Unlike the telephone, this network will
also be a publications medium, distributing electronic
newsletters, video clips, and interpreted reports.

We can speculate but cannot be sure about novel uses of
the network.  An information marketplace will include
electronic invoicing, billing, listing, brokering,
advertising, comparison-shopping, and matchmaking of
various kinds. "Video on demand" will not just mean
ordering current movies, as if they were spooling down
from the local videotape store, but opening floodgates to
vast new amounts of independent work, with high quality
thanks to plummeting prices of professional-quality
desktop video editors. Customers will grow used to
dialing up two-minute demos of homemade videos before
ordering the full program and storing it on their own
blank tape.

In time, we can expect the development of  "virtual
realities" to simulate experience over the network.  If
scientists want to explore the surface of a molecule,
they'll do it in simulated form, using wrap-around three-
dimensional animated graphics that create a convincing
illusion of being in a physical place.   This
visualization of objects from molecules to galaxies is
already becoming an extraordinarily powerful scientific
tool.  Networks will amplify this power to the point that
these simulation tools take their place as fundamental
scientific apparatus alongside microscopes and
telescopes.

Less exotically, a consumer or student might walk around
the inside of a working internal combustion engine --
without getting burned.  Eventually, multiple-person
virtual realities will emerge, with several individuals
crawling around that molecule or engine at once,
affecting each other's experience.

Some of this will be free to the user -- subsidized by
advertising, or tax money -- while much of it will be
charged for through the network in the same way that toll
calls are paid for today. If it's easy enough to be a
provider of information, the distribution charges may
often be nominal. Many newsletters, or even newspapers,
will be interactive; you won't just read them, but
participate in them, like today's computer bulletin
boards.

If, as economist Robert Reich has observed, today's
economic benefits come from the intelligence of a labor
force, then the public network will become a repository
for that capital, a source of competitive wealth for any
country with access to it. People will keep their
families intact through it, participate in government
through it, and develop their sense of community through
it in ways that hitherto have only been possible in the
smallest of towns.

Perhaps the most significant change the National Public
Network will afford us is a new mode of building
communities -- as the telephone, radio, and television
did. People often think of electronic "communities" as
far-flung communities of interest between followers of  a
particular discipline. But we are learning, through
examples like the PEN system in Santa Monica and the Old
Colorado City system in Colorado Springs, that digital
media can serve as a local nexus, an evanescent meeting-
ground, that adds levels of texture to relationships
between people in a particular locale. To both local and
long-distance communities, accessible digital
communications will be increasingly important; by the end
of this decade, the "body politic," the "body social,"
and the "body commercial" of this country will depend on
a nervous system of fiber-optic lines and computer
switches.

A number of humanist thinkers, politicians, and social
activists recognize this. Several  have tried to raise
public consciousness about the importance of a national
public network. But it is not enough to simply say that
the technology should promote community.

We must learn to stop talking about moving bits of
information, and learn instead to judge specific
technical measures according to the impact they will have
on people. Otherwise, the dangers are very real: the
network could be dominated by a few commercial titans (as
broadcast networks have been), or its potential
capabilities could be hamstrung. Or it might be designed
to be too difficult for the general public to use.

In that spirit, I offer a set of recommendations for the
evolution of the National Public Network.  I first
encountered many of the fundamental ideas underlying
these proposals in the computer networking community.
Some of these recommendations address immediate concerns;
others are more long-term.  They are organized here
according to the main needs which they will serve: first
ensuring that the design and use of the network remains
open to diversity,  second, safeguarding the freedom of
users. The ultimate goal is to  develop a habitable,
usable and sustainable system -- a nation of electronic
neighborhoods that people will feel comfortable living
within.

I
Encourage Competition

In the context of the NREN, act now to create a level and
competitive playing field for private network carriers,
both for-profit and not-for-profit  to compete.  Do not
give a monopoly to any carrier.    Any  user should be
able to reach any other user, without fear of being cut
off or overcharged because their particular carrier is
blackballed by a powerful monopoly or oligopoly.

The post-divestiture phone system offers us a valuable
lesson: a telecommunications network can be managed
effectively by separate companies -- even including
bitter opponents like AT&T and MCI -- as long as they can
connect equitably.     The deregulated telecommunications
system may not work perfectly and may produce too much
litigation, but it does work. We should never go back to
any monopoly arrangement like the pre-divestiture AT&T
which held back market-driven innovation in
telecommunications for half a century.

Similarly, the National Public Network (and its
prototype, the NREN) must be allowed to grow without
being dominated by any single company. Otherwise, a
dominant carrier might use its privileged access to
stifle competitors unfairly: "Use our local service to
connect to our undersea international links, without the
$3 surcharge we tack on for other carriers." The most
greatest danger is "balkanization" -- in which the net is
broken up into islands, each developed separately,
without enough interconnecting bridges to satisfy users'
desires for universal connectivity.

After 1992, private companies will manage an ever-greater
share of the NREN cables and switches. The NSF should use
both carrot and stick to encourage as much
interconnection as possible. Some formal affirmation of
fair access is needed -- ideally by an "Internet Exchange
Association" formed to settle common rules and standards.
(Their efforts, if strong enough, could forestall a
costly, wasteful crazy-quilt of new regulations from the
FCC and 50 State Public Utilities Commissions.) This
industry association should decide upon a "basket" of
standard services -- including messaging, directories,
international connections, access to information
providers, billing, and probably more -- that are
guaranteed for universal interconnection.

In the context of the eventual National Public Network,
strong consideration should be given to allowing both the
telephone companies and cable television companies to run
the "last mile" fiber-optic cable to the home.  While
such an infrastructure is more expensive due to its
redundancy, the competitive benefits of this arrangements
would outweigh the additional costs.   Competition
between telephone and cable companies for consumer
business would more of an incentive to lower costs and
improve service than any system of regulation.  Of
course, all content services offered by anyone, anywhere
should be available through any carrier.  This will
require the development of cooperative settlement
agreements between the carriers, as is presently the case
in voice telephone services.  The right to run the wire
into the home must not be confused with the right to
control what goes over the wire.


II

Stimulate Information Entrepreneurship

Encourage information entrepreneurship through an open
architecture (non-proprietary) platform, with low
barriers to entry for information providers.

The most valuable contribution of the computer industry
in the past ten years  is not a machine, but an idea --
the principle of open architecture. Typically, a hardware
company (an Apple or IBM, for instance) does not design
its own software, as computer companies did in the
mainframe era. Instead, the hardware company creates a
"platform" -- a common set of specifications, published
openly so that smaller, independent firms can develop
their own products (like the spreadsheet program) to work
with it. In this way, the host company takes advantage of
the smaller companies' ingenuity and creativity.

Even  interfaces rigidly controlled by a single
manufacturer, like the Macintosh, embrace the platform
concept. Two years ago, when Apple began planning its
"System Seven" Macintosh operating system, one of its
first steps was to invite comment from software companies
like Macromind, Aldus, Silicon Beach, and T/Maker. In
substantive, sometimes very argumentative sessions, Apple
revealed the capabilities it planned to these
independents, who knew their customers and needs much
better than Apple. One multi-media company, after arguing
that Apple should take a different technical turn,
actually found itself doing the work in a joint project.
The most useful job of Apple's famous "evangelists" is
not selling the Mac specs, but listening to outsiders,
and helping Apple itself stay flexible enough to work
with independent innovators effectively.

Telephone and cable television companies (the most likely
builders of the National Public Network) could appoint
their own "evangelists." Instead of casting themselves as
rivals to large newspapers, they could invite other media
companies into a collaborative design process. Like other
host companies, they would find that being a platform
provider makes great business sense. As the copyright
owner of the MS-DOS operating system, Microsoft makes a
few dozen dollars whenever an IBM-compatible personal
computer is sold. Because they've already done the
development work, that money is pure profit.

As the personal computer business shows, platform
providers and their application developers can and do
coexist, more or less happily.  While Apple's Claris
software division competes directly with the major
providers of application software for Apple's Macintosh
computer, leading software developers manage to work
closely with Apple nonetheless.  If Microsoft is
presently less successful at this, it should not be taken
as evidence that the model of cooperation between
platform vendor and application supplier can't work --
only that an Apple-like approach might serve better.

The Regional Bell Operating Companies could be freed of
the MFJ  and permitted to be in the applications and
service business --  but only if they support a truly
open platform for development. Unfortunately, the open
platform idea is alien to phone company planners from the
old AT&T tradition of a centralized monopoly service
provider which fought a decades-long losing battle to
remain a closed system.  Ironically, if experience is any
judge, they are much more  capable at making the platform
than they would be at designing innovative information
and communication services.

An open platform network would actually make some MFJ
restrictions less necessary. Phone companies are
prohibited from being information providers because their
overwhelming capital gives them an unfair advantage. But
on a network in which an information provider faces small
start-up costs  --  because the platform itself is so
rich and well-designed --  creativity and quality mean
more than huge cash reserves. Instead of restricting
information providers, the National Public Network
developers should encourage the entry of as many new
parties as possible. Just as personal computer companies
started in garages and attics, so will tomorrow's
information entrepreneurs, if we give them a chance.
Their prototypes today, small computer networks,
electronic newsletters, and chat lines, are among the
most vibrant and imaginative "publishers" in the world.

There should be thousands of information proprietors on
the net, just as there are thousands of producers of
personal computer software today and thousands of
publishers of books and magazines.  It should be as easy
to provide an information service as to order a business
telephone. Large and small information providers will
probably coexist as they do in book publishing, where the
players range from multi-billion-dollar international
conglomerates to firms whose head office is a kitchen
table. They can coexist because everyone has access to
production and distribution facilities -- printing
presses, typography, and the U.S. mails and delivery
services -- on a non-discriminatory basis.  In fact, the
sub-commercial print publications are an ecological
breeding ground, through which mainstream authors and
editors rise. No one can guarantee when an application as
useful as the spreadsheet will emerge for the NPN (as it
did for personal computers), but open architecture is the
best way for it to happen and let it spread when it does.

The PC revolution was brought about without direct public
support.  Entrepreneurs risked their investors' capital
for the sake of opportunity.  Some succeeded, but many
others lost their entire investment.  This is the way of
the marketplace.  We should take a much more cautious
attitude about the commitment of public monies.  In the
absence of proven demand for new applications, government
should not be spending billions of dollars on the
creation of broadband networks.  Neither should telephone
companies be allowed to pass on the costs of the NPN in a
way which would raise the rates for ordinary voice
telephone service.

Instead, we should look for incremental opportunities to
show there is a market for network applications.  The
commercial experiments just beginning on the Internet
provide one source of innovation.  Deployment of a
national ISDN platform in the next few years represents
another relatively inexpensive seed bed.  As such
experiments demonstrate more of a proven demand for
public network services, it should be possible for the
private sector to make the investments to build the
broadband NPN.

III

Encourage Pricing for Universal Access

Everyone agrees in the abstract with universal service --
the idea that any individual who wishes should be able to
connect to a National Public Network. But that's only a
platitude unless accompanied by an inclusive pricing
plan.

The National Public Network design should mandate a low-
cost level of user participation. Cable TV is a good
model: joining a service requires an investment of $100
for a TV set, which 99% of households already own, about
$50 for a cable hookup, and perhaps $15 per month in
basic service. Anything beyond that, like premium movie
channels or pay-per-events is available at extra cost.
Similarly, a carrier providing connection to the mature
National Public Network might charge a one-time startup
fee and then a low fixed monthly rate for access to basic
services, which would include a voice telephone
capability.

Because regulators are concerned about any telephone
service that might cause the price of basic voice service
to rise, they are unwilling to approve new services which
don't immediately recover their own costs.  They are
concerned that any deficit will be passed on to consumers
in the form of higher charges for standard services.  As
a result, telephone companies tend to be very
conservative in estimating the demand for new services.
Prices for new services turn out to be much higher than
what would be required for universal digital service.
This is a kind of catch-22, in which lower prices won't
be set until demand goes up, but demand will never go up
if prices aren't low enough.

Open architecture could help phone companies offer lower
rates for digital services. If opportunities and
incentives exist for information entrepreneurs, they will
create the services which will stimulate demand, increase
volume, and create more revenue-generating traffic for
the carriers.  In a competitive market, with higher
volumes, lower prices follow.

IV

Make the Network Simple to Use

The ideal means of accessing the NPN will not be a
personal computer as we know it today , but a much
simpler, streamlined information appliance - a hybrid of
the telephone and the computer.  The family sedan is
going to be an information appliance.  As such it will
have to be transparent.

"Transparency," in computer circles, is a subjective
state of awareness -- and a desirable one. When a program
is perfectly transparent, people forget about the fact
that they are using a computer. The mechanics of the
program no longer intrude on their thoughts. The most
successful computer programs are nearly always
transparent: a spreadsheet, for instance, is as self-
evident as a ledger page. Once users grasp a few concepts
(like rows, cells, and formula relationships), they can
say to themselves, "What's in cell A-6?" without feeling
that they are using an alien language.

Personal computer communications, by contrast, are
practically opaque. Users must be aware of baud rates,
parity, duplex, and file transfer protocols -- all of
which a reasonably well-designed network could handle for
them. It's as if, every time you wanted to drive to the
store, you had to open up the hood and adjust the
sparkplugs. On most Internet systems, it's even worse;
newcomers find themselves confronting what John Perry
Barlow calls a "savage user interface." Messages bounce,
conferencing commands are confusing, headers look like
gibberish, none of it is documented, and nobody seems to
care. The excitement about being part of an extended
community quickly vanishes. On a National Public Network,
this invites. People without the time to invest in
learning arcane commands would simply not participate.
The network would become needlessly exclusionary.

The problem arises because the technically proficient who
are the original inhabitants of the net are highly
adapted to the primitive state of its user interfaces.
They live in a state of oneness with technology, but they
are about to discover a lesson that native peoples all
over the world have been forced to confront.  The arrival
of new settlers requiring civilized amenities to shelter
them from the harsh conditions disturbs the fabric of
native life .  The real challenge for designers of the
network is in preserving the subtlety and power of its
original state while making it broadly accessible.

If we have the vision and commitment to try this, the
transformation of the network frontier from wilderness to
civilization need not display the brutality of 19th
century imperialism.   As commercial opportunities to
offer applications and services develop, entrepreneurs
will discover that ease of use sells. The normal,
sometimes slow, play of competitive markets should cause
industry to commit the resources to serve the market by
making access more transparent.  But at the start
transparency will need deliberate encouragement --  if
only to overcome the inertia of old habits.


V

Develop Standards of Information
Presentation

The ease of telephone service depends on agreed-upon
standards. When a phone call is dialed from New England
Telephone through MCI to Pacific Bell, the machinery of
all three companies must work together to make the
appropriate link and charge the correct fees. On the
NREN, and eventually on the National Public Network,
standards are being developed  to move billions of 1's
and 0's per second between vastly different pieces of
equipment connected to the network.

Standards for networks are arranged in a series of
layers. The lower levels detail how the networks'
subterranean "wiring" and "plumbing" is managed.  Well-
developed sets of lower-level standards such as TCP/IP
are in wide use and continue to be refined and extended

The uppermost layers contain specifications such as how
text appears on the screen and how documents  are
composed of components.  These are the kinds of concerns
which are directly relevant to users who wish to
communicate.  Recently independent efforts to develop
high-level standards for document formats have begun, but
these projects are not yet being integrated into computer
networks.  Now is the time for the technical community to
embark on a major initiative to create an integrated
suite of high-level standards for the exchange of richly
formatted and structured information, whether as text,
graphics, sound, or moving images.

Today, for example, the only common standard for computer
text is the American Standard Code for Information
Interchange (ASCII). But ASCII is inadequate; it ignores
fonts, type styles (like boldface and italics),
footnotes, headers, and other formats which people
regularly use. Each word processing program codes these
formats differently, and there is still no intermediary
language that can accommodate all of them. The National
Public Network will need such a language  to transcend
the visual poverty and monotony of today's
telecommunicated information. It will also need
additional standards beyond what have been developed for
message addresses and headers, a common set of
directories (the equivalent of the familiar white pages
and yellow pages directories), common specifications for
coding and decoding images, and standards for other major
services.  The development of standards is vital, not
just because it helps ensure an open platform for
information providers; it also makes the network easier
to use.



VI

Confirm Constitutional Protection for
Freedom of Speech

Governments, whether, federal, state or local, should not
have the power to restrict or censor content on the
network. Period.

The First Amendment right of free speech, which the
Supreme Court has said applies to all forms of speech,
not simply political debate should be as central to this
medium as it is to print. It should apply not just to
"private" material
(addressed to specific individuals) but also to material
that is "published" (offered under the imprimatur of an
editor responsible for its contents), or "posted"
(entered by individuals in a public forum).

Government restraint of information prior to its
publication or transmission is to be prohibited.  The
Supreme Court has tightly circumscribed the condition of
prior restraint in the Brandenberg case.  This important
decision says that  no speech is to be subject to prior
restraint unless it is intended to incite and is likely
to cause imminent lawless action.

Freedom of speech does not provide a blanket immunity for
speakers.  Criminal conspiracy, fraud, libel, and
copyright infringement are real issues of concern in
digital media.  Where speech also has a behavioral
component, speakers must still be accountable.  With this
exception, the right to speak free from fear of
government censorship must be paramount.


VII

Affirm the Principles of Common Carriage

Whenever a company serves as a conduit for data
transmission between private parties, it should be
assumed that no deliberate interference -- either
changing of content, or refusal to carry a message
because of content -- will take place.

Common carriers are companies which transport for the
general public.  They include railroads, trucking
companies, and airlines as well as telecommunications
firms.  A communications common carrier, like a telephone
company is required to provide its services on a non-
discriminatory basis.  It has no liability for the
content of any transmission. A telephone company does not
concern itself with the content of a phone call.  Neither
can it arbitrarily deny service to anyone.

The carriers of the National Public Network, whether
telephone companies, cable television companies, or other
firms should be treated in a similar fashion.  A carrier
must guarantee equity of access and be free from content
liability concerns.

If a cable television system offered customers thousands
of fiber optic channels as part of the NPN, it would not
be permitted to control which providers had access to
those channels.  Instead, hundreds of millions of
consumers would be directly served by tens of thousands
of producers in a system of "video on demand" whose
dynamics would more closely resemble the diversity of
print media than television.

Our society  supports the publication of many thousands
of periodicals and fifty thousand of new books a year as
well as countless brochures, mailings, and other printed
communications.  Historically, the expense of producing
professional-quality video programming has been a barrier
to the creation of similar diversity in video.  Now the
same advances in computing which created desktop
publishing are delivering "desktop video" which will make
it affordable for the smallest business, agency, or group
to create video consumables.  The NPN must incorporate  a
distribution system of individual choice for the video
explosion.

We have grown up in an era of scarcity of broadcast
channels due to the limited spectrum of over the air
broadcasting.   We are not used to the fact that we can
have freedom of choice in the selection of video and
audio programming.  The NPN will render the government-
awarded monopoly of broadcast rights obsolete.

If the cable company wants to offer a package of program
channels, it should be free to do so.  But so should
anyone else.  There will continue to be major demand for
mass market video entertainment, but the vision of the
NPN should not be limited to this form of content.
Anyone who wishes to offer services to the public should
be guaranteed access over the same fiber optic cable
under the principle of common carriage.  From this access
will come the entrepreneurial innovation, and this
innovation will create the new forms of media that
exploit the interactive, multimedia capabilities of the
NPN.

Today computer network carriers are also concerned about
legal liability.  Their status as common carriers isn't
clearly established as it is for telephone companies.
Their uncertainty tempts them to reduce risk by imposing
restrictions on content. This must be prevented. It may
turn out that careful legal analysis shows computer
networks are already wholly or partially protected, or it
may be that some new legislation is required. Some
advocate a solution which mandates common carrier status
for NPN carriers, and at the same time expands state and
federal regulation of rates and operations.  This would
have a crippling effect of the pace of innovation and is
to be avoided.

VIII: Protect Personal Privacy

The infrastructure of the NPN should include mechanisms
that support the privacy of information and
communication.

The privacy of telephone conversations and electronic
mail is already protected by the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act. Without a valid court order,
for example, wiretaps of phone conversations are illegal
and private messages are inadmissible in court. Legal
guarantees are not enough, however.  Although it is
technically illegal to listen in on cellular telephone
conversations, as a practical matter the law is
unenforceable.   Imported scanners capable of receiving
all 850 cellular channels are widely available through
the gray market.

Cellular telephone transmissions are carried on radio
waves which travel through the open air.  The ECPA
provision which makes it illegal to eavesdrop on a
cellular call is the wrong means to the right end. It
sets a dangerous precedent in which, for the first time,
citizens are denied the right to listen to open air
transmissions.  In this case, technology provides a
better solution.

Technologies have been developed over the past 20 years
which allow people to safeguard their own privacy. One
tool is public-key encryption, in which an "encoding"
algorithm is published freely, while the "decoder" is
kept secret.  People who wish to receive encrypted
information give out their public key, which senders use
to encrypt messages.   Only the possessor of the private
key has the ability to decipher the meaning.

Privacy protection would be greatly enhanced if public-
key encryption chips were built into the entire range of
digital devices, from telephones to computers.  The best
way to secure the privacy and confidentiality Americans
say they want is through a combination of legal and
technical methods.

As a system over which not only information but also
money will be transferred, the National Public Network
will have enormous potential for privacy abuse. Some of
the dangers could be forestalled now by building in
provisions for security from the beginning.

For industry to do so will require a change in federal
policy.  It is illegal for U.S. firms to export products
using public key encryption technology.  The National
Security Agency fears that global availability would
interfere with intelligence gathering activities and are
therefore a national security concern.  This necessity of
this requirement needs to be reviewed in the light of
changing national priorities of the post-Cold War era.


Conclusion

The chance to influence the shape of a new medium usually
arrives when it is too late: when the medium is frozen in
place. Today, because of the gradual evolution of the
National Public Network, and the unusual awareness people
have of its possibilities, there is a rare opportunity to
shape this new medium in the public interest, without
sacrificing diversity or financial return. As with
personal computers, the public interest is also the route
to maximum profitability for nearly all participants in
the long run.

The major obstacle is obscurity: technical
telecommunications issues are so complex that people
don't realize their importance to human and political
relationships. But be this as it may, these issues are of
paramount importance to the future of this society.
Decisions and plans for the NPN are too crucial to be
left to special interests.  If we act now to be inclusive
rather than exclusive in the design of the NPN we can
create an open and free electronic community in America.
To fail to do so, and to lose this opportunity, would be
tragic.