Philosophically, the NII should be viewed as a new means of controlling our personal locality – choosing our working associates, vendors, entertainers, and perhaps even friends, without being limited to those that happen to be physically near. With the importance of physical proximity diminished, every person on the national information infrastructure could assemble his or her own electronic neighborhood.
It is an investment that will grow and weave itself into our homes and businesses, becoming part of the fabric of the nation’s economy and everyday life as much as the telephone is today. Beause of this tight bonding, the NII would be definitely “ours,” assuming the United States is the first to set one up; other countries would have difficulty exploiting it for their own competitive advantage the way they have so many other technologies that originated in the United States.
Most of these intiatives call for services to be centrally controlled by a country’s government national phone company. In my view, this centralized infrastructure approach is as misguided and doomed to stagnation as the centralized economies of the USSR and Eastern Europe – and largely for the same reasons … In my view, a model that is far more likely to succeed in the United States and elsewhere, however, is one where buyers and sellers of information services compete freely, much as producers and consumers of conventional goods and services do today.
The NII would not eliminate today’s vendors of information. Rather, it would offer these businesses a larger market, modify somewhat their roles, and create a richer, more competitive environment.
As the NII becomes a reality, groups will undoubtedly emerge that view it as a threat. TV and radio networks, cable companies, movie theaters, and print publishers would perceive their roles as being diminished, since anyone with a computer could become a publisher or broadcaster. This would democratize the media – albeit at the cost of our becoming inundated with choices and a great deal of informational junk. The prospect of such a mess, however, would bring into the picture a new form of publishing. Literary entrepreneurs would sift through the junk for diamonds and, with the authors’ agreement, edit and sell their findings over the NII.
As software gets better, security will be easier to implement. Indeed, the vulnerabilities that organizations will face will probably be in the human and physical security areas, rather than in the telecommunications part of their structure or activities.
The information superhighway is going to grow up just like the Internet grew up, as a series of small disconnected networks that eventually interface and interoperate with one another. The future of the information superstructure is going to be based on the Internet and a suite of private value-added networks. You’ll see regional installations and private companies with their own internal networks forming the new network.
The rise of broadband, interconnected, interoperable transmission facilities is going to change the way the government monitors communications. The government is no longer going to have the luxury of access to virtually all communications. And of course, among those who will implement this sort of technology will be those in the criminal world.
Let the software and hardware providers come up with encryption solutions and compete on the open market to meet providers’ and individuals’ needs. Any kind of top-down approach, such as the government’s mandated standard, has the problem of not really letting the market work to make the technology truly efficient … Government should declare victory and get out; I think that’s a fairly good assessment on building the information highway.
The question is not whether there will be fraud, but how bad do things have to get before people will stop using the system. The whole NII [National Information Infrastructure] community is going to feel the effects. Financial insitutions may get hit, small businesses that are providing a service may get ripped off and people working on their home computers may find that their information gets disclosed. If that happens, to some extent, people are going to say “Hey, this isn’t worth it, I’m not going to do this.” That is going to limit the kinds of services that are available on the NII.