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6 PUBLIC POLICY AND PRIVATE ACTION
Pages 197-234

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From page 197...
... The workshop, forum, and set of white papers developed for the NII 2000 project, like the steering committee, mirror society in presenting divergent perspectives. Regardless of political sentiments about its role in general, government at all levels will inevitably be a major player.
From page 198...
... As Robert Crandall of the Brookings Institution observed, "Once regulation becomes a system for politically redistributing income, and cross-subsidizing one service out of another, it becomes very difficult to allow competition and the entry of new technologies."3 Participants in this project pointed to both telecommunications regulation, per se, and the Modified Final Judgment decree arising from the AT&T Corporation antitrust suit as forces constraining entry.4 Although those inputs centered on existing telephone and cable businesses, other comments related to the challenge of how to foster entrepreneurialism, development of new information infrastructure industries, and market entry by smaller and nontraditional players. As Quincy Rodgers of General Instrument observed, smaller players have fewer resources, limiting their ability to enter certain markets successfully.
From page 199...
... to make them available. Thus the Internet illustrates government investment as a catalyst to private investment in both the demand and the supply sides of information infrastructure.
From page 200...
... that provide access in various public spaces Jackson, 1995~. They show both the potential for and limitations of public access arrangements, with limitations including the level of access achieved, the public nature and therefore limited personal privacy afforded of the access, and the limited ease of use and thus the training requirements.
From page 201...
... ,ll it is an area that warrants explicit monitoring and assessment, on behalf of those who cannot afford their own personal computers. Public access should be the focus of a testbed or other type of experimental program to explore technical, cost-sharing, and other dimensions of the issue.
From page 202...
... Any further process, presumably, should tip the business case toward a common architectural framework. The message of the NII 2000 project is that such a business case may emerge over time.
From page 204...
... Bell Communication Research's Padmanabhan Srinagesh, who has been studying the economics of internetworking, suggested that "there might be a trade-off between encouraging competition at the lower levels, at the level of bits in the networks, versus having an open architecture where the people who provide the bits also provide a standardized open interface that other people can use to compete with them for end users." But the National Cable Television Association's Wendell Bailey observed that the cable industry was built on control of content, albeit in an environment of local monopoly franchises: "We relish, as an industry, our right to be an editor." Content publishers and customers may prefer the convenience of maximal openness, but conduit owners express concern that an obligation to carry any kind of content reduces them to common carriers and may therefore constrain their potential to generate profits through selection and differentiation. At the same time, if they are not common carriers they assume a heavy legal obligation with respect to the content they provide, even it they did not originate it.
From page 205...
... llllll#IanlIlllllun-I\llll~lll^IlI-lllallllYlllll~+lllllllllllll 203 finds little reason for concern that closed systems ~iH represent an Sue that Dig require policy intervention/ beyond traditional tools of compete bon policy such as anthrusL The position of most developers is that new applications Dig come into existence over the Internet an open system, and that an application/ if inidaNy created in an open form/ has a natural resistance to being bundled. In support of this tendency/ the steering committee notes the success of the Internet itself the evolutionary path by Which the on-hne service providers have become Internet access provid
From page 206...
... This approach includes encouraging the deployment of communications infrastructure that is general and flexible, removing regulatory barriers to innovation (for example, making spectrum for experiments easily and predictably available and competition, and continuing to foster the success of the Internet through R&D and use in the delivery of public services. DEFINING ROLES FOR GOVERNMENT The large volume of descriptive material and statements of opinion elicited at the workshop and the forum and in the white papers provide some insights into current and potential roles of government (at all levels)
From page 208...
... and its disproportionate impact on emerging wireless services for which basic facilities are being built-and on state and local infrastructure initiatives.~4 In brief, many deployment decisions and activities are proceeding independently of regulatory decision making or are based on best guesses as to likely developments in telecommunications reform.~5 The proliferation of Internet-related activities Web servers and applications, security services that support commercial transactions over the Web, the formation and growth of Internet access providers, and so on illustrates an unregulated venue for growth. By contrast, contentious disagreement
From page 209...
... Protecting the NII: Ethics and Mechanisms Contributors to the NII 2000 project articulated concerns about privacy, intellectual property, free speech, ethical conduct, and, in particular, security, but given the scope of the project these issues did not receive a great deal of attention.~9 The discussions of plans for and progress toward deployment, especially in the context of the relatively insecure Internet, suggest that these concerns have not been showstoppers-although they may have altered the form or emphasis of decisions about deployment or use. Thus, Robert Crandall cautioned that some of the rhetoric on these issues may be a red herring.
From page 210...
... See Box 6.7. Comments by Ed Hammond of Duke University Medical Center and others underscored the importance of engaging people with large-volume, specialized needs in areas of national importance, such as health care, both because of the wide-ranging consequences of decisions and because the issues may be nonobvious, counterintuitive, or contentious.2i Quincy Rodgers argued that determinations of level of security and methods of implementation should be seen as business decisions, which in turn has implications for standardization, service provider decisions about whether specialized access devices (e.g., set-top boxes)
From page 211...
... ; the absence of corresponding cross-community or cross-sectoral processes, some of which require international interaction, on mechanisms for security and other protections;22 and the need for yet other processes to ensure that a complex and multifaceted information infrastructure can, like the relatively simpler telephone network, meet national security and emergency preparedness needs (see the white paper by Lois Clark McCoy et al.~. The rallying cry in the national security and emergency preparedness area is for an "emergency lane on the information superhighway," addressing inherent security and reliability issues plus support for the security needs of those managing public crises that require rapid recovery, disaster recovery, and mobilization.
From page 212...
... Providing another example, the white paper by fohn Ziebarth et al. proposes a testbed for network-accessible information storage, access, and system management to better handle huge collections of regulatory information from multiple government institutions.25 National Institute of Standards and Technology Director Arati Prabhakar cast the opportunities for government use as part of the larger context of public-private interaction: "One of the great opportunities here is to abandon the traditional way that government agencies and depart
From page 213...
... The Government Information Locator Service is a cross-cutting information access initiative that could be used to explore various approaches and implementation issues; the National Spatial Data Clearinghouse is one of several more specialized information access programs that could also yield broader insights. Aiken and Cavallini note that government applications need not be viewed as "one size fits all," any more than private sector applications are.
From page 214...
... and equally farsighted applications-de~relopment decisions.26 The history of the Internet shows that applications and experiments in certain user domains and, Increasingly important today, applications that are cross-domain in nature may provide one of the most constructive vehicles available to the government for stimulating private action. As suggested by Aiken and Cavallini, information infrastructure can be part of a system for facilitating government-~ndustry interactions.
From page 215...
... Accordingly, Randy Katz et al. assert in a white paper that "direct research and development is the most effective way to stimulate new service capabilities and associated commonalities." One context for R&D that received considerable mention and support is the testbed building on the history presented by the Internet and the more general recognition that understanding complex systems depends on building and testing them and associated opportunities for collaborative exploration.
From page 216...
... That is an area where I believe government funding is absolutely essential. As Realizing the Information Future (CSTB, 1994b)
From page 218...
... Commented Lois McCoy, "What the user wants is the answer to his question. It doesn't make any difference what that question IS./, The information management problem calls for R&D in many areas.
From page 220...
... Wiederhold observed that "[miaking choices is best supported by systems which provide a limited number of relevant choices (summaries, searching, selecting) ." Similarly, Reagan Moore of the San Diego Supercomputer Center wrote of the need for techniques for data assimilation-mining and modeling
From page 221...
... . Related issues in standardizing data formats are discussed below.
From page 222...
... go as far as to suggest in a white paper that virtual environments could be considered a superset of information infrastructure issues, in view of the concerns with scale, interactive three-dimensional graphics coordinating input devices with a single-screen display, and so on, with illustrations including a live threedimensional sports stadium with instrumented players, a 100,000-player problem for a military war game, and virtual worlds as laboratories for robots and people in scientific research. Standards If consensus on system engineering and architecture issues for most of the NII network environment is to be implemented, that implementation will take the form of standards.
From page 223...
... suggest in their white paper that the "research [community] and government can take a leading role in establishing new commonalities that foreshadow industry standards." Also, although receiving little discussion, a government role for standards-related validation and dissemination could be valuable.
From page 224...
... As Maria Farnon of Tufts University notes in her white paper, "Bodies like the ITU [International Telecommunications Union] have grown increasingly irrelevant with the introduction of new services such as the Internet and have seen their turf eroded by new organizations that do not necessarily have official government sanction." These new services and organizations have been embraced or at least tolerated in almost every nation on earth, setting an important precedent for the value to each nation of reasonably unrestricted international access.
From page 225...
... How can public or private entities aim to influence something without knowing the extent of an issue or the impact of a contemplated action? Again, the private sector has used market research data more or less effectively, but much of that information comes from proprietary and unpublished studies (yet another argument for public testbeds)
From page 226...
... The white papers by Reagan Moore and by Hans-Werner Braun and Kimberly Claffy of the San Diego Supercomputer Center argue that "the NII continues to drive funding into hardware, pipes, and multimedia-capable tools, with very little attention to any kind of underlying infrastructural sanity checks." The authors go on to relate deployment of new technology to measurement problems: "With the transition to ATM [asynchronous transfer mode] and high speed switches, it will no longer even be technically feasible to access IF [Internet Protocol]
From page 227...
... enthusiasm for accelerated deregulation not only to speed market entry but also to allow licensed carriers the freedom to use their assigned spectrum innovatively implying a reduction in governmental authority to direct NII evolution unilaterally. The concerns expressed about the lagging of many domain-specific areas of application, despite the prospect for important economic drivers from the application industries, suggest that this enabling role for governments reaches into many areas of government responsibility and is important at the state as well as the federal level.
From page 228...
... However, it seems evident that something more long range and more centered in private sector participation is needed than the IITF and the former NII Advisory Council. The essential requirement is that both the information service providers and the information creators and users in the private commercial and not-for-profit sectors must be fully involved, along with relevant government bodies.
From page 229...
... These responsibilities clearly fall primarily to public and private institutions outside the realm of telecommunications and high-performance computing, and they must be taken up by the relevant bodies in their own self-interest. However, the federal government and the states can, within their own operational missions, act to reduce the barriers to the creation of needbased demand for information infrastructure.
From page 230...
... It should keep its tools, such as the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, available to deal with any situation that might arise In the future. Particularly important will be better data collection and analysis to reduce some of the guesswork and improve the bases for decision making In industry, government, and elsewhere on infrastructure de~relopment, selection, and use.
From page 231...
... The white paper by the Organization for the Protection and Advancement of Small Telephone Companies notes, for example, that some areas are characterized by longer subscriber loops and other impediments to digital service. Perhaps some cause for optimism can be read into recent analyses of AT&T, which, as noted in CNRI (1995b)
From page 232...
... 12. These include the federal inter-agency Information Infrastructure Task Force and the former associated National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council, the American National Standards Institute and the associated Information Infrastructure Standards Panel, the Cross-Industry Working Team organized under the auspices of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, the Council on Competitiveness, EDUCOM, the Coalition for Networked Information and its member organizations, and others.
From page 233...
... then pending before the Federal Communications Commission. The regional Bell holding company (RBOC)
From page 234...
... 27. See the white paper by Oscar Garcia on behalf of the IEEE.


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