roundtable: Administration Articulates Goals for the NII

roundtable: Administration Articulates Goals for the NII

Administration Articulates Goals for the NII

W. Curtiss Priest (BMSLIB@mitvma.mit.edu)
Fri, 28 Apr 95 09:00:03 EDT 

Message-Id: <9504281303.AA10003@a.cni.org>
Date:         Fri, 28 Apr 95 09:00:03 EDT
From: "W. Curtiss Priest" <BMSLIB@mitvma.mit.edu>
Subject:      Administration Articulates Goals for the NII
To: Telecommunications Policy Roundtable <ROUNDTABLE@CNI.ORG>


          "Letter of March 6th from Al Gore to Lewis Branscomb"

CITS Observations
Dr. W. Curtiss Priest, Director

We have here articulated administration "goals" for the NII!  For
many of us on the Telecommunications Roundtable NorthEast and in
other forums, this position is welcomed information.

Tom Kahil, by phone (MIT Communications Forum 4:15PM, April 27th, 1995),
described in greater detail the Administration's goals for the NII:

    1.  The NII should be many-to-many (not one-to-many)
    2.  The NII should support a wide variety of applications (and not
        permit just, say, video applications)
    3.  The NII should lower barriers to publishing (working against
        having 'few providers')
    4.  The NII should provide low barriers to access providers
    5.  The NII should be flexible and able to take advantage of
        the continuous technological changes (it should not, not be
        extensible)

These are very well defined and exciting goals.

Tom Kahil also asked some questions:

    1.  The National Research Council's report (mentioned below)
        indicates that private industry is not contemplating services
        that would support the above goals.  This raises questions
        about what role the government should have in promoting these
        goals?

    2.  Is there a role for public/private partnership?  Is there
        a government role to promote open data networks?  And doesn't
        the government have a role in sponsoring R&D, test-beds, and
        the like?

Our position is that it should come as no surprise that these questions
are being raised because of the 10 forms of "market-failure" and 2 forms
of "non-market" characteristics of information that we released in
1986, have made available via gopher and www at eff.org, and provided
to various forums, yesterday, in our document:

                               Public Issue #10:

                "Developing an Equitable Information Structure --
                          the Role for a Public Hand"

    At:
    gopher.eff.org (under similar organizations, CITS
    WWW: http://www.eff.org, under Documents & File Archives, under Gopher

In this "pro-industry" climate, it comes as no surprise that the Federal
Government must "back into" its role to provide the "Public Hand."

It is frustrating, however, to us and to members of the audience at the
forum yesterday, that business is NOT providing the information age that
many of us would like, and that companies such as Bell Atlantic have
just announced backing off from ventures such as video dialtone.

We encourage the administration to suggest to members of the Congress to
ask the Office of Technology Assessment to build on the work commissioned
by Linda Garcia on the Character of Information (1986 study on Intellectual
Property) and use "policy science" to better identify the government's role.

The appeal to a committee of "experts" is defensible, but hardly
creative, nor very scientific, in an era where public policy analysis
can provide useful and concrete answers.

For example, see our publication:

                        Public Issue #6:
                       September 26, 1994

                 "Public Policy Research, the NII
                       and the Public Good"

                  (under CITS06 at the above site)

See also our Report to the Office of Technology Assessment, _The
Character of Information_, 1986, 1994, at the web site under Reports.
***********************************************************************

Letter released to the public, April 27th by Tom Kalil
THE VICE PRESIDENT

WASHINGTON

MArch 6, 1995

Dr. Lewis Branscomb
Center for Science and International Affairs
John F. Kennedy
School of Government
79 JFK Street Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Dear Dr. Branscomb: [Signed Lewis]

On behalf of the Adminstration, I want to thank you for the work you and 
your colleagues are doing in connection with the National Research 
Council's "NII 2000" Committee.

There is one issue that the Administration is particularly interested 
in that I hope the Committee can shed some light on.  Although the 
Administration's NII policy is technology neutral, we wou1d likc to see 
an NII that allows individuals to be producers as well as consumers of 
information, that enables "many to many" communication, and that provides 
a "general purpose" infrastructure capable of supporting a wide range of 
services.

The NRC's previous report on the NII, Realizing the Information Future,
concluded that some U.S. companies may invest in an infrastructure that 
is capable of providing one-way video delivery but not a broader range 
of services. For this reason, it would be very helpful to have an 
objective assessment of the capabilities of different residential 
broadband architectures (e.g. hybrid fiber-coax, fiber-to-the-curb, 
wireless alternatives) being deployed by he private sector.  The NRC 
could select a representative sample of applications and services 
(videoconferencing, high-speed access to the Internet or other on-line 
services, telecommuting, distance learning, grassroots electronic 
publishing) and determine whether the broadband architectures under 
consideration will be capable of supporting these applications.

Clearly, market considerations will drive the technology and architectural
ddcisions of U.S. telecommunications providers.  Furthermore, a network 
that may originally support a limited range of services can be 
incrementally upgraded in response to consumer demand. The Administratiion 
has absolutely no interest in mandating a particular technology.  This 
would be completely contrary to the Administration's NII philosophy.

03/14/95    16:16    202-456-7132          WHITE
                                           HOUSE/NEC

                                  2


However, we are interested in working cooperatively with industry and 
academia to promote a shared vision of a versatile, general purpose 
infrastructure with a "Jeffersonian" architecture.  We would welcome 
any concrete suggestions the Committee may have for advancing these goals.

Thank you again for your work on this important NRC Committee.

Sincerely,

                                            [Signed Al]
                                            Al Gore

AG/tak

_______________________________________________________________________________
|           W. Curtiss Priest, Ph.D., Director       *********************** |
|      Center for Information, Technology, & Society *  Improving humanity * |
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|                Melrose, MA  02176-4522         BMSLIB@MITVMA.MIT.EDU       |
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