The telephone companies would need to set up the NII’s initial transport capabilities and communication conventions … Because the NII’s communication conventions would be so vital, special-interest groups would form to establish and maintain these standards. One group, for example, might tackle common conventions for financial transactions, another for manufacturing information and another for entertainment.
I don’t know that we’re at a decision point where we’re going to decide what the future of audio and video is, but I think we’re at the point where people are going to be able to plug in whatever they need to on top of our platform to be able to deploy whatever applications they want to.
No matter how much faster computers become relative to their price, they will not be fast enough to outrun the artistic imagination. Nor will artists be able to afford them … Cyberspace is a public good. Vice President Gore’s abandonment of the national “information superhighway” to private development by media conglomerates should give us little hope of realizing a digital world any lovelier than the mall, or Home Shopping Channel, anytime soon.
Web browsers [will] soon disappear.
As people get more comfortable with the idea and as people realize that there are going to be a lot of corporations who are going to want to escrow their keys, without regard to the question of Clipper or law enforcement, just so that they can conduct their own kinds of security procedures and guarantee themselves against misuse by their employees in encryption, you’re going to see companies look very closely at the idea of escrowing keys privately.
What would be the ideal in a few years if everything happened right? There would be a single cross-platform plug-in object technology where you could slot components in. It’s sort of the Holy Grail right now. I’m skeptical that there will be enough cooperation between vendors to make it happen.
In the real world, people with just and unjust causes can place themselves in public spaces so as to be seen and heard whether we want to or not. They cannot be “screened out,” by law. If cyberspace is to have any purely public domains, then, provision (ii) of The Principle of Personal Visibility must be suspended there. And by law.
[The government’s] role is to provide just enough standardization – in just the right places – to let market forces speak in a competitive environment, but on the other hand, to keep people from being “locked out” by the competition.
What we are talking about is nothing less than a revolution in the way we communicate … The complexity of the task is so great that it is absolutely essential that government and industry work together.
There seems little question that an electronic superhighway will exist. When, who will build it and how eager average Americans will be to use it are other questions. While many Americans seem interested, the convergence of so many technologies needs to be easy to use – in a single box at home, and at a price people are willing to pay. Some skeptics believe that, like existing computer networks, the superhighway will be navigated by an elite circle of techno-freaks.