rfc1527.txt

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   Finding the best answer to the questions raised by this issue is
   likely to center on the ability of the Federal mission agencies
   involved in high speed network development to articulate a long term
   plan for the development of new network technology over the next
   decade.  How we shall use what is learned in the gigabit testbeds has
   not yet been clearly addressed by policy makers.  Continuation of the
   testbeds is currently uncertain. There is also no plan to apply the
   outcome to the production NREN.  These are areas deserving of federal
   involvement.  The current players seem to be incapable of addressing
   them.  Some possible courses of Federal action will be identified in
   the discussion of a Corporation for Public Networking to follow.

   In the meantime, we face a period of four to five years where the NSF
   is scheduled to take the NSFnet backbone through one more bid.  While
   Federal support for the current production backbone may be
   questionable on technology grounds, policy makers, before setting
   different alternatives:

          -    must understand very clearly the dual policy drivers
               behind the NREN,

          -    must define very clearly the objectives of the network,
               and

          -    must carefully define a both a plan and perhaps a
               governing mechanism for their achievement.

   A sudden withdrawal of Federal support for the backbone would be
   likely to make a chaotic situation more so.  However, the application
   of focused planning could define potentially productive alternatives
   to current policies that could be applied by the time of the backbone
   award announcement in April of 1993.

Whom Shall the Network Serve?

   The HPCC legislation gives the FCCSET a year to prepare a report to
   the Congress on goals for the network's eventual privatization.
   Thanks to the NSF's decision to rebid the backbone, this task may no



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   longer be rendered moot by premature network privatization.  The
   FCCSET Report needs to address many questions.

   One question is the extent to which, in the higher education
   environment, Congress through the National Science Foundation, or
   perhaps through another entity of its own choosing will continue to
   underwrite networking.  A related question is whether or when
   Congress should act in order to preserve a competitive networking
   provider environment.  A question subsidiary to this is whether a
   competitive commercial environment is adequate to ensure a fertile
   data networking technical R&D environment?  Another related question
   centers on what is necessary to preserve network access that is as
   widely available to post-secondary education as possible?  Further
   issues center on what type of access to promote.  Should Congress
   support the addition to the network of many of the expensive
   capabilities promoted by the advocates of the NREN vision?   What if
   funds spent here mean that other constituencies such as K-12 do not
   get adequate support?

Access to the NREN is a key policy issue.

   If network use is as important for improving research and education
   as its supporters allege it to be, Congress may wish to address the
   issue of why, at institutions presently connected to the network,
   only a small minority of students and faculty are active users.  If
   it examines the network reality carefully, Congress may sense that it
   is time to leverage investment in the network by improving the
   network's visibility and usability within the communities it is
   supposed to serve through improved documentation and training rather
   than by blindly underwriting massive increases in speed.

How Far To Extend Network Access?

   With the broadening discussion of the NREN vision, expectations of
   many segments of the population not originally intended to be served
   by the network have been raised.  An avid group of educators wishing
   to use the network in K-12 education has arisen.  If
   commercialization brought significant price increases, it could
   endanger the very access these educators now have to the network.

   Native Americans have begun to ask for access to the network.  How
   will Congress respond to them?  And to the general library community
   which with the Coalition for Networked Information has been avidly
   pressing its desires for NREN funds?  And to state and local
   government networks?

   Congress should recognize that choices about network access for these
   broader constituencies will be made at two levels.  Access for large



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   numbers could be purchased by the government from commercial
   providers at considerable expense - an unlikely development in view
   of the Federal budget deficit.  In the meantime, given the current
   mix of government supported and commercial providers, the environment
   for these user classes is quite competitive.  Those who are able to
   pay their own way can generally gain access to the network from a
   choice of providers at reasonable cost.  Congress can act on behalf
   of these constituencies by ensuring that the market for the
   provisioning of network services remains open and competitive.  Short
   of either regulating the industry or establishing a new government
   operated network, careful use of subsidies will have the most impact
   on ensuring an open and competitive network.  Congress can also
   choose to view access as a function of price.  If Congress does opt
   for this course, it has several choices to ensure that prices will be
   affordable.  It could seek to impose regulations on the network
   providers through the FCC at a national level or urge the state PUCs
   to do it at the local level.  (Of course the viability of state PUC
   regulation, becomes questionable by the near certainty that there
   would be little uniformity in how the PUCs in each state would treat
   a national service.)  Congress also could impose a tariff on network
   providers profits and use the tariff to subsidize universal access.
   It should, of course, understand that these courses of action would
   raise touchy questions of conflicts between Federal and state
   jurisdiction.

   Congress may also have been vague in dealing with these broader
   network constituencies, because it wishes to sidestep making these
   difficult choices.  The origin of most of these choices may be traced
   to the addition of education policy goals for the Network symbolized
   by the changing of its name from the National Research Network to the
   National Research and Education Network in the OSTP Program Plan in
   September 1989. While this action got the attention and support of
   new constituencies for the Network, it did not bring any significant
   shift to the science and mission agency oriented direction of network
   development.  The legislation remained essentially unchanged:
   "educators and educational institutions" were as specific as the
   language of the bills ever got.  Perhaps this was almost on purpose?
   Having goals that were more specific might imply the need to justify
   with some precision why some individual segments of the networking
   community deserved service while some did not.

   Unless Congress were able to construct a separate rationale for the
   needs of each of the network constituencies - from supercomputer
   users to grade school students - specific goal setting by Congress
   might imply that Congress was arbitrarily judging some network
   constituencies to be more worthy than others.  This would be a
   difficult course to follow because those who were left out would want
   to know what the basis for such a judgment would be?  Solid answers



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   would be difficult to come by because networking as enabling
   educational technology is so new that no one is as yet quite sure how
   to measure its value.  Without such assurances, it may be difficult
   for Congress to know how to justify its spread on any other grounds
   than equity of opportunity.

   Indeed there is a constituency of grass roots-oriented, small-scale
   network builders allied with elements of the library community.  This
   constituency suggests that computer networks will very quickly become
   such powerful means of access to information that lack of access to
   them will soon will carry serious implications for social and
   economic equity within the nation.

   These groups can be expected to be very vocal in their demands that
   some minimal level of access to the national network be widely
   available and affordable.  They are likely to ask that Congress turn
   its attention to the feasibility of establishing the goal of
   universal access to the national network.  Although the technology
   and economic conditions are quite different from the conditions of
   the 1934 Communications Act, they are likely to demand action
   analogous to that.

   Motivated by these concerns, Mitch Kapor has been arguing very
   eloquently for the building of the NREN as a National Public Network.
   Asked to define what he saw as being at stake, he said the following
   to the author in September 1991:

      "Information networking is the ability to communicate by means of
      digitally-encoded information, whether text, voice, graphics, or
      video.  Increasingly, it will become the major means for
      participation in education, commerce, entertainment, and other
      important social functions.  It is therefore important that all
      citizens, not just the affluent, have the opportunity to
      participate in this new medium.  To exclude some is to cut them
      off from the very means by which they can advance themselves to
      join the political social and economic mainstream and so consign
      them to second-class status forever.  This argument is analogous
      to that which was made in favor of universal voice telephone
      service - full social participation in American life would require
      access to a telephone in the home."

   Kapor through his Electronic Frontier Foundation, (EFF) is working
   hard to make sure that Congress is compelled to address the question
   of universal network access.  The EFF has also begun to press for the
   use of ISDN as a technologically affordable means of bringing the
   benefits of a national network to all Americans.

   If Congress wishes to promote widespread access to the network and to



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   design an network that is amenable to widespread use, it will do well
   to examine carefully the position that the EFF is articulating.  It
   would also do well to look outside the confines of the Federal
   Networking Council (FNC) and the FNC Advisory Commission that is made
   up of members similar in orientation to the FNC and is scheduled for
   only four meetings and a two-year-long existence.  If it wishes to
   increase secondary and elementary school access to the network, it
   could investigate enlarging the very small role granted by the
   legislation to the Department of Education.  Unfortunately, without
   careful planning what would be gained by this is unclear.  The
   Department of Education has never played a significant role in
   computer networking.  The immediate needs of the K-12 arena are
   focused mainly around maintaining the existence of affordable low
   bandwidth access and the support of successful pioneering efforts.

   When Congress states its intentions for the scope of access to the
   network and, as a part of doing so, sets priorities for investment in
   network bandwidth versus ease of use, it can then turn its attention
   only to one other area.

A Corporation for Public Networking?

   Network governance and oversight are key policy issues.