A debate has begun about the future of America’s communications infrastructure. At stake is the future of the web of information links organically evolving from computer and telephone systems. 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.
You want an example of a communication system that doesn’t charge for transport? The English language. Think of the Internet as a language rather than a machine, and most of your questions [about charging people to use it] become irrelevant. I think the Internet is tougher than you give it credit for. From now on, the struggle will not be over mechanical control of the means of information, but over spin-control of the zeitgeist.
Since it’s clear that users want flat-rate pricing – and I should make it clear that I like it, too – any [company] that didn’t offer it would go out of business.
How can use be rationed? Economists Jeffrey MacKie-Mason and Hal Varian at the University of Michigan propose a “congestion pricing” scheme. When your computer sent off a packet, it’d attach a note of how much you were prepared to pay for it to arrive promptly – say 0.002 U.S. cents for 200 bytes. Automatic real-time “auctions” at switching centers would determine the lowest “bid” at which packets would be passed; every packet which got through would pay that lowest price, and others would be delayed. When there was no congestion, all packets would travel free … “Netizens” really would become hitchhikers on the infobahn, squeezing into the gaps in the coming flood of commerce.
The biggest threat to unmetered Internet access can be express in one phrase: “Free International Long-Distance Telephone.” It is now possible with software to have an almost real-time voice conversation over the Internet. This has the potential of putting a huge amount of new traffic on the Net and of competing with the phone companies that own much of the Net.
Senator Daniel Inouye introduced a bill … calling for a “public lane” on the infobahn. It would reserve up to 20 percent of the capacity of new advanced telecommunications networks, such as 500-channel cable into homes, for “non-commercial educational and informational services and civic discourse.”
The Net represents the most important new effort to expand democracy into a wide range of human endeavors … usage pricing could extinguish list-servers.
When a resource can be used without marginal cost, eventually community and cultural constraints will break down and the commons will be stripped bare. Ask any dolphin … Equity of access is also a worry: if the Net is as powerful as its proponents believe, what happens if a global underclass is excluded? “We believe in the pressing need for global democracy, not a global supermarket,” declared the February ’94 New Delhi Symposium on New Technologies.
New technology promises to make available the capacity of being able to provide Internet services to people on remote or mobile platforms. The metaphor might be World Wide Web to the Rain Forest and also to platforms such as oceanographic research vessels … let’s just say that we are looking for an appropriate means of serving remote and mobile applications that have heretofore not been feasible.
My guess is that sooner or later in Europe there will be general service provision of backbones, just as we have now in the U.S. What I am saying is that in the not-to-distant future – and I don’t know if we are talking one, three or five years. but certainly within that time frame – a lot of the so-called R&E community in Europe will be served by general-purpose providers, just as the R&E community will now be in the U.S. In this kind of situation, it doesn’t make any sense for the U.S. government to stay in there and maintain its own intercontinental links.