The planned private-sector, multibillion-dollar investments in enabling infrastructure suggest that it is easier for businesses and investors to see profit in home entertainment than in the information-sharing activities on the Internet.
Predictor: National Research Council
Prediction, in context:In 1994, the NRENaissance Committee, appointed by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council, produced a special report titled “Realizing the Information Future: The Internet and Beyond.” Among the committee members were Internet pioneers Leonard Kleinrock, David Clark, David Farber, Lawrence Landweber and Robert Kahn. The committee’s goal was to “study issues raised by the shift to a larger, more truly national networking capability.” Among its statements about the blossoming of the National Information Infrastructure (NII) is this: ”The Internet has benefited already from substantial private investments, often through partnerships aimed at extending the infrastructure and experimenting with new services and modes of delivery. For example, IBM and MCI contributed millions of dollars to the NSFNET backbone … The Gigabit Testbed program funded by NSF and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), credited with accelerating the industrially driven development and deployment of asynchronous transfer mode and SONET technologies, involves substantial commitments of money, time, and talent from telecommunications companies … Thus, private-public partnerships have been essential to Internet growth for some time – the federal Internet investment has always been bounded and leveraged … Successful delivery of Internet service to the research and education communities is not necessarily an indicator that the same service will succeed commercially, because the research and education communities are not a microcosm of society … Competition among Internet access providers for a budget-constrained clientele suggests that there are negligible margins to support donations of services, cross-subsidies, or hypothetical new taxes or other mechanisms aimed at generating support for needy users. The planned private-sector, multibillion-dollar investments in enabling infrastructure suggest that it is easier for businesses and investors to see profit in home entertainment than in the information-sharing activities on the Internet … financial analyses in the wake of the aborted Bell Atlantic-TCI merger suggest that investors may become more conservative about profits and opportunities relating to the cable industry (and even telephone companies), potentially constraining the flow of capital.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Cost/Pricing
Name of publication: Realizing the Information Future: The Internet and Beyond
Title, headline, chapter name: Federal and Other Funding for Networking to Date
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://stills.nap.edu/html/rtif/
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney