Gaining access to the Internet and locating the information resources available over the network requires equipment, telecommunications connections, and information-seeking skills that many Americans do not yet possess or cannot afford. The information superhighway has the potential to deepen the divisions between the information “haves” and “have-nots.”
We are specifically concerned about tribal rights and sovereignty. We wish to reaffirm that the realm of cyberspace will be governed by a philosophy of government-to-government relations, including tribal control of information about ourselves and tribal control of the policies governing the telecommunication medium itself, especially on reservations … Indian leaders … familiar with the medium are concerned that its vast potential will not be harnessed to promote cultural and economic progress, but will instead perpetuate the historical subjugation of Indian people.
Every month, something newer and weirder happens, and the Internet seems to be substantially different every three months … Many worry that “big business” – providers or users – will destroy the Internet. I’m not worried; I believe there’s always room for research, educational, hobbyist and hacker communities. And, frankly the essential technology is readily available to anyone who wants to buy it, as the growth of shoestring providers demonstrates; if the Internet no longer provides an adequate home, I would expect that a core of network users could and would create Internet II within 48 hours. Indeed, that’s what a lot of what we have today is; a virtual network within the Internet, owned and operated by the Internet community. Much of what businesses are doing today leverages these efforts, making the Internet in some ways a trickle-up enterprise.
New users represent revenue to fatten the access and backbone transport infrastructure, fund the information infrastructure and whois++ and other directory services, and provide more Archie and Veronica servers and mirror archive sites. They represent a market that can support development of commercial Internet user software … They represent a marketplace for value-added information services, which also means more money going back into the infrastructure. They help make more of the Internet self-funding without relying on revenue from the government, research or education users. Business and unaffiliated users also bring validation … And they bring a sense of perspective. The needs and desires of businesses and individuals are often different from those of the academic, research and government communities – but the filling of these new needs will benefit the original communities, whose own new users will want ease of use and comprehensive suites of services.
With public-access Internet sites, anyone with a personal computer and a modem can become an Internet user. This is the equivalent of being able to buy an automobile and go driving without having to take a driver’s education course, pass a test or become licensed … It creates the reality of tens of thousands of users set loose on the “Internet on-ramp” and raring to go. These users don’t necessarily do any harm, but they can place enormous, unanticipated loads on Internet services … I see the community of individual users as putting a greater demand on the Internet’s user services infrastructure – and stressing these services – versus primarily consuming bandwidth like the business community. The demand and revenues created by individual users may help sites to upgrade their links, e.g., from on-demand to permanent or from 56 Kbps to fractional, full and multiple T1.
In the 1993 version of this article, I predicted that the next wave of commercial services for Internet users would include access to a wider range of dictionaries, encyclopedias and other reference materials, which would then become available to these sites’ users as part of their standard hourly or monthly fees. This has yet to materialize, but I stand by my prediction.
Business users appear to be consuming mostly bandwidth. Given that they are paying – quite probably at higher rates – this means more self-funded ‘lanes on the Internet highway,’ which in turn may help Internet Service Providers migrate to faster, more cost-effective links and roll out more local POPs (Points of Presence) … The continuing stream of business users into the Internet should help build up the transport infrastructure, providing a growing set of permanent and on-demand alternatives to the current transit solutions (e.g. the CIX and ANS CO+RE). Over time, we can also look to the business community as a major source of demand for pay-for-use information services such as real-time and reference databases (e.g. financial data, schedules, professional and technical texts and publications). How much demand the business community will generate for “user services” is hard to predict.
[The new-user] group represents our biggest challenge: to find ways to let them educate themselves in the parking lots of cyberspace, rather than on the main roads where other users are trying to get work done … It only takes a percentage of a percentage of new, well-meaning but ill-directed users (not to mention the less-than-well-meaning) to disrupt the activities of thousands, even millions, of regular Internet users.
[New users’] desires and activities can easily distort the usage flows, arbitrarily saturating popular sites and services – most of which, it’s important to remember, are labor-of-love offerings made available for free, but with no guarantee of availability, or intended in some fuzzy fashion for “the Internet community.” But within the past few years, media attention has made the Internet appear a vast, often free super-resource, as opposed to a large, shared resource that users must replenish as well as consume. Moreover, much of the “neat stuff” on the net is somewhere between “proof of concept” and “neat hacks.” There is no way these can be readily available to teeming millions of new cybersurfers within the current provisioning of user services and resources.
If the goal is indeed “access to information,” then we need to reinvent the public library, clearly the institution most vitally affected by the digital revolution. This must be undertaken on a scale equivalent to Andrew Carnegie’s efforts to institutionalize the “free library” a century ago. The new challenge is more subtle and elusive than building collections behind brick-and-mortar walls. It requires building on mass-market commercialization of technology, exploiting economies of scale, and attending to transaction costs. It means recognizing the remarkable ability of information technology to both penetrate and reconstruct walls – and turning such remarkable characteristics to strategic advantage in principled policy framework.