Internet Outlook with Richard Wiggins | 44


Vol. 1 No. 2	July 7, 1997	home / experts / internet

The Information Superhighway versus the Interstate Highway System

The Death of the Information Superhighway

In part, because it would've been a very bad idea. The very term "Information Superhighway" has always been misleading. We should think in terms of an "information highway system." The prototype information highway was the NSFnet, which provided sufficiently fast national data pipes to allow Internet technologies to flow out of the world of government and univerisities and into K-12 schools and into the imagination of the public at large.

The National Science Foundation probably didn't know what it was getting into when it built the NSFnet in the mid-1980s; they couldn't have forseen the explosive growth of Net awareness starting in 1992. But the NSF was wise enough to get out of the way when it was time for a commercial national infrastructure to take over. Commercial firms (mainly telephone companies such as MCI) now run multiple parallel national backbones in the U.S., supported by fees paid by those who use the bandwidth. It's unthinkable to imagine a single Federally owned "information superhighway" in place of the current system. The nature of available telecommunications pipes, and the structure of the telecommunications industry, mandated something different than a single monolithic analogue to the Interstates.

Of course, we wouldn't have an Internet as we know it without the investments of the U.S. government. DoD funding of Arpanet and Internet research was fundamental to the development of the Net as we know it today. One of the most ignorant statements made by one of the "revolutionary" Republican freshmen in 1994 was that "the Internet is proof of the genius of American business." Actually the Internet is proof of the wisdom in spending Federal dollars on basic research -- and then letting private industry carry the fruits of that research into usable products. From packet switching to IP to NCSA Telnet to Mosaic, U.S. Federal dollars have been vital in the birth of Internet technologies.

What About Federal Funding of Internet Development?

The biggest effort for creating next-generation tools is the Internet2 project; significantly, this is a consortium of over 100 U.S. universities, not the Federal government. Internet2 and other projects can benefit from Federal seed money, but there is no need for a massive overarching Federal presence. Federal dollars can still do a lot of good -- in promoting research into basic technologies that will improve how the Internet works, and how people find the information they need on the Net.

When the NSF privatized the NSFnet, they explicitly stated their intent to stop investing in raw bandwidth. Today, to the extent the Federal government supports new networking infrastructure, money goes to wire the schools or to connect public libraries to the Net -- not towards national backbones.

To use the highway metaphor, Federal networking research dollars go towards how to make a better car (Internet applications) or better asphalt (connectivity technologies). And Federal networking infrastructure dollars help build on-ramps, not Interstates. In both cases this is entirely appropriate.

The lesson for this Administration, and for other national governments, is that the Internet has taken on a life of its own that knows no borders. The Internet will evolve because of decisions in Mountain View, Redmond, or one Cambridge or the other -- not Washington, Bonn, or London. The U.S. government deserves a lot of credit for the first sunrise of the Net. Now, the sun never sets on the Internet empire. Rule Internetania!