This existing set of involved parties is bewilderingly large and diverse, and it is growing. It is also fragmented … A consequence of the broadening and fragmentation is that the concerns of the research, education, and library communities are not consistently addressed and are in danger of not being heard.
Public libraries and public interest groups … have argued that basic government-generated information should be made available directly, without adding value, to the user, either for free or at the cost of documentation. Given that the government has already incurred the costs of creating and processing the information for governmental purposes, the economic benefit to society is maximized when government information is publicly disseminated at the cost of dissemination to both end users and value-added redistributors … Internet dissemination may help to explore opportunities for reconceptualizing the kind as well as the form and delivery of information of broad public interest, allowing the government, commercial providers, and the public to move beyond the form and content of “government information” based on traditional printed packages.
For decades, publishers and commercial information services providers also have been exploring ways to create, produce, and deliver information over networks … Controls on access and use are very important to these businesses, as is the ability to charge for access and use. Funding for the digitization and electronic supply of noncommercial materials is an ongoing concern facing both publishers and consumers of those materials in the research and education communities.
How network and information access are priced will affect the ability of new users and communities to engage with the information infrastructure. Linking access and service to ability to pay would be inherently exclusionary. This problem lies behind consumer group and state regulatory efforts to moderate the pace of infrastructure advances and tariff changes.
For the research and education communities in particular, an increasing emphasis on network-based access to information raises questions about whether there is a need for a minimum level of access – and what that level is, how basic it is in terms of the quality of service (speed, support for video or multimedia, and so on), the locus of access (on each desk or in each classroom or in such communal and institutional facilities as libraries), and the breadth of reach (within a state or region, national and/ or international, connections to which information provider gateways, and so on).
Tomorrow it is clear that the mix of services will change in two ways. First, the format will change; there will be more video, audio, multimedia, and real-time services, in contrast to the flat text and binary data files that dominate Internet traffic today. Second, there will be more third-party providers of information, which will be offered on a free or at-cost basis by government and on a revenue-generating/profit-making basis by commercial providers.
The increase in capabilities will make possible an overall shift from electronic-mail exchange and modest file-transfer activities to online distribution of large volumes of data (both measured and modeled), fueling in turn continued rapid growth in scientific researchers’ demands for network services.
The issues of scale in the number of nodes are perhaps more challenging that those of speed. As the network gets larger, issues of addressing, routing, management and fault isolation, congestion, and heterogeneity become more relevant. These issues are further complicated by the likely decentralized management structure of the NII, in which the parts of the network will be installed and operated by different organizations. We see in the Internet today that some of the protocols and methods are reaching their design limits and need to be rethought if we are to build a network of universal scale. A major effort is now being made to deal with serious limitations in the Internet’s current addressing scheme, for example.
A truly national information infrastructure will be much harder to shape than was the Internet … The broader the conceptualization of the information infrastructure – the farther it extends to embrace information generation and use as well as transport – the greater the planning needed to make it all work together and the broader the relevant policy framework. The scale, scope, and visibility of “wiring up” not only the education and library communities, but also every home and public entity in the United States, present an enormous challenge. Compounding domestic conditions is the fact that whatever measures are taken in the United States must anticipate and sometimes respond to conditions in the foreign networks and infrastructures to which the U.S. infrastructure is and will continue to be interconnected.
Some researchers and educators who depend on the Internet may need some assistance in adjusting to increased infrastructure prices. Infrastructure support should be a function of the overall research funding process … The critical concerns are avoiding disruption from a sudden and sharp imposition of new user charges, minimizing administrative burdens, and assuring equitable access to public support. Over the long term, more generalized mechanisms may evolve.