The number of miles dwarfs that of the interstate. But they would not exist except for the clear direction, the definition of standards, the clear idea of what an interstate highway is, what it looks like, where it is, what it means. And then everybody else can sort of aim toward that reality. And that’s what’s happening [with the Internet] and we anticipated that.
The Senate’s actions bring schools and businesses and research centers a significant step closer to the powerful computers and high-speed networks that will make their work more rewarding, more profitable, and more effective.
No private player has the wherewithal to finance the research and development into the new generation of switches, software and algorithms that are necessary to produce the very high-capacity network that we’re talking about. You would see the emergence of interim steps, but you would not see the country as a whole hurdle the entry barrier to a broad-band network without government leadership.
This [the NREN] represents a great example of how industry and government can work together to develop a key technology needed for the effective use of a national network of data super-highways soon to be in place.
The existence of a premier information marketplace in the United States will give our companies and our citizens an advantage in worldwide competition. There will be many other developments that are currently invisible to us. Just as the development of the Interstate Highway System led to the creation of McDonald’s hamburgers, Holiday Inn and a thousand other new commercial developments that would have been impossible without the Interstate Highway System, in the same way we will see the emergence of information services on a nationwide basis that will be extremely profitable and nearly ubiquitous.
It will be possible for creators of software and other forms of electronic intellectual property to download their products into a national grid and make contact between buyers and sellers instantaneously.
It will be possible for manufacturers to communicate with their subcontractors and suppliers, not just in the dry language of orders and receipts, but in the form of three-dimensional, highly detailed blueprints and prototypes.
Just as every home in America is now linked to the rest of the country by a driveway that goes to a street, that goes to a highway, that goes to an interstate, we want every home and business in America to be linked by an information highway into a national network that will ultimately be … invisible to the user in the sense that the information will be there at the desktop terminal.
In the next decade, it will be possible for an elementary school student to come home after class and instead of playing Nintendo, plug into the Library of Congress and explore an entire universe of information along a road map defined by that child’s curiosity – with the information appearing not only in the form of words but in the form of vivid, moving colored pictures precisely keyed to the subjects and questions of most interest to that student.
Innovations such as the information superhighway will mean that “instead of just playing Nintendo after school,” children will be able to “plug into an electronic library.”