There’s a revolution in global telephony coming that will have such brutal, industry-crushing speed and power that it will make even the computer industry blanch. Analog is dying everywhere. Everyone with wire and antenna is going into the business of moving bits.
We have an opportunity to create media that would match the splendid ambitions of Franklin with his public libraries and his mail system, and Jefferson and Madison with their determination to arm democracy with the power knowledge gives. We could offer children, yes even poor children in poor districts, a real opportunity to control the screen, for once.
What you propose here, ladies and gentlemen, may well represent nothing less than this nation’s last and best hope of providing something like a level socio-economic playing field for a true majority of its citizens.
Like bank ATMs, people will start to use cyberspace-based government services if they make interaction with government easier and faster.
Cyberspace isn’t a technological problem. It’s the solution that will enable government to continue to economically deliver vital services like education, social services, and adequate health care while making the interface between government and citizens easier and more rapid no matter where those citizens happen to live.
All information is not of equal value and this lies at the heart of much of the problem with cyberspace as represented by the Internet in its current state. There is a vast volume of data flooding through the network that one must wade through to find information.
The NII would bring together buyers and sellers of information services in the true sense of a traditional marketplace.
Common directory services would make it easier to cope with the richness of services available, and entrepreneurs would, for a fee, advise users about the servers most suitable for their needs.
If it is rejected, the implications for criminal justice could be profound. As the information superhighway continues to expand into every area of society and commerce, court-ordered wiretaps and seizures of records could become tools of the past, and the information superhighway a safe haven for criminal and terrorist activity.
Our saturation with information we don’t need, with noise that increasingly rattles us, will begin to pall … We will come ever more to resent the time it steals from our lives. Very few people any more want a real superhighway through their neighborhood, and perhaps it will someday be the same with megatube.