The commercial experiments just beginning on the Internet provides 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 using experience from the NREN.
The diverse needs of these many users will create demand for 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.
The standards adopted must meet the needs of a broad range of users, not just narrow needs of the mission agencies that are responsible for overseeing the early stages of the NREN. Positive efforts should be made to encourage the development of experimental commercial services of all kinds without requiring the negotiation of any bureaucratic procedures.
After 1992, private companies will manage an ever-greater share of the NREN … The NSF should use both carrot and stick to encourage as much interconnection as possible. For example, the NSF could make funding to NREN backbone carriers contingent on participation in an internetwork exchange agreement that would serve as a framework for a standards-based environment. As the NREN is implemented, some formal affirmation of fair access is needed – ideally by an “Internet Exchange Association” formed to settle common rules and standards … This 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.
[I recommend we] act now to create a level and competitive playing field for private network carriers, (whether for-profit or not-for-profit) to compete. Do not give a monopoly to any carrier … Encourage information entrepreneurship through an open architecture (non-proprietary) platform, with low barriers to entry … Everyone agrees in the abstract with universal service … But that’s only a platitude unless accompanied by an inclusive pricing plan … 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 National Public Network will need an integrated suite of high-level standards for the exchange of richly formatted and structured information, whether as text, graphics, sound, or moving images … full support for First Amendment values.
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.
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 … 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.
There will be other important uses of the network as a simulation medium for experiences which are impossible to obtain in the mundane world … Networks will amplify this power to the point that these simulation tools take their place as fundamental scientific apparatus alongside microscopes and telescopes.
“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.
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.