2.5 FURTHER LESSONS FROM THE INTERNET EXPERIENCE

Although the Internet has been an enormous success, the computer science community is still in the process of discovering how networking can best be done. Along the way, we have learned many useful lessons that will apply to the design of the NII as well. These lessons include the following:

• The technical development of a network is not an easy process. Particularly in the early days, researchers were surprised at how difficult network technology turned out to be, and all the problems are not yet resolved.

• Network design and development must be evolutionary. In the process of getting to the current design, many alternative strategies were attempted and then discarded. The right answers emerged slowly through experimentation. That experimentation continues today and must certainly continue into the future, if the NII is to respond to evolving needs.

• Substantial research and development funding is required to develop the technology. Over the years, the Internet and its predecessor networks have required significant investment of both public and private resources to overcome the difficult problems that arise in network design. New technologies and new uses for the network will require additional research and development on an ongoing basis.

• An open, cooperative environment is critical to network success. By combining the efforts of many researchers and building up a shared technological base, the network was able to grow and develop much more successfully than would have been possible using a less cooperative approach.

• Users tend to engage in communication rather than information retrieval. The most popular services on the Internet include electronic mail, bulletin boards, and programs to mediate on- line conversations. People enjoy the opportunity to communicate with other people and to build new communities that share interests or concerns. As an example of such community-building, the Internet is home to a discussion group for women who work with computers. The participants often find that they are the only women in their work group -- sometimes, the only women in their company. The on-line group allows them to discuss problems they have encountered and to get advice on how to work through difficult situations. At the very least, they find sympathy and assurance that they are not alone. The NII ought to provide the mechanism for the formation of many such distributed communities.

The stakes are clear. The NII has the potential to introduce a uniform, centralized, oppressive viewpoint that further stratifies and polarizes society. With thoughtful design, however, the NII could provide universal access, support developing communities, and nurture true democracy.

PART 3

BACKGROUND ON THE PRINCIPLES AND RECOMMENDATIONS

3.1 PUBLIC-INTEREST PRINCIPLES

CPSR equates the public interest with a strong and unequivocal commitment to democratic principles. By most objective evidence, the practice of democracy in America has been eroding steadily in recent years. Voter participation continues to decline, citizens are uninformed about political and social issues, and there is widespread public cynicism about the entire process of government. More than any other public-policy initiative, the National Information Infrastructure (NII) has the potential to reverse this erosion and give new life to our democratic principles. We believe that the design and structure of the NII will have a profound effect on the future of democracy in America.

CPSR believes that the seven principles for the NII outlined by the Telecommunications Policy Roundtable are essential to the realization of a democratic society. Those principles, therefore, must occupy a privileged and protected status in the development of NII policy. In order to serve the public interest, the NII must be both designed and operated according to those principles.

Much of the current debate over the NII has focused on who will build the carrier hardware and what levels of regulation need to be provided. CPSR believes that the questions are important primarily to the extent that they influence the principles and goals of democratic practice. The public interest depends upon the rules of the game -- how the NII will be designed and operated -- and the necessity of preventing concentrations of political or economic power from dictating those rules at the expense of democratic principles. For this reason, our primary concern is that debate on other issues be framed so as to preserve the unique and irreplaceable status of the public-interest principles, which are expanded in the sections that follow.

UNIVERSAL ACCESS

Universal access to the NII is a necessary and basic condition of citizenship in our information-driven society. Guaranteeing such access is therefore an absolute requirement for any degree of equity. At a minimum, universal access requires the following conditions:

• Everyone in the country must have a place they can go to gain access to the NII.

• Hardware and software for the NII must be easy to use and fit the needs of all users, including the disabled.

• Simple training in the effective use of these tools must be available.

• Pricing for the NII must be structured so that service is affordable by everyone.

• Access to the full range of features supported by the NII must be available to all.

FREEDOM TO COMMUNICATE

Freedom of speech and of the press are fundamental characteristics of a democratic society. In the 18th century, when these freedoms were encoded in the Bill of Rights, human speech, the printing press, and postal delivery were the most sophisticated means of communication available. These tools, and the guarantees that everyone would have access to using them, were seen as vital to economic, social, and especially political life. Today, the need for expression is increasingly met through electronic communication.

Protecting every citizen's right to freedom of expression must be a fundamental goal of the NII. The freedom to communicate has two essential aspects. On the one hand, those who speak must be able to do so without fear of censorship. On the other, it is essential that all people have the opportunity to be heard in the first place. While these two aspects are closely linked, their realization often requires separate and distinct policies.

In seeking to ensure freedom from censorship, a clear line must be drawn between those domains of the NII dedicated to private interests, which are largely free to determine their own operating policies, and domains available for public use. The constitutional protections on freedom of expression must be protected in all public spaces within the NII. Moreover, it is important to ensure that such public spaces continue to exist in the NII, just as they do in today's Internet.

Our collective experience with network communication has shown that a certain level of civility enhances the quality of service for all users. To this end, CPSR believes that it is important for network communities themselves to formulate ethical principles and standards for appropriate behavior that can serve as guideposts for those who choose to participate in those communities. We believe that censorship based on the content of expression must not be imposed from the top down. Citizens must feel as free to express themselves over the NII as they do today over the telephone.

At the same time, it is essential to protect the rights of citizens to be heard in the first place. As A.J. Liebling observed when he wrote that "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one," the high costs of entry into traditional print and broadcast media have formed a barrier to individual expression throughout this century. By lowering the economic barrier, computer networks make it possible for individuals to express their ideas much more widely through electronic mail, on-line publications, mailing lists, and bulletin boards. In the Internet today, people use these tools extensively as a means of expression, and it is important to retain these capabilities in the NII.

The NII requires two kinds of resources to allow individuals to publish their own contributions using the NII. First, it must provide a physical connection that can carry information in both directions. Second, it must offer software tools that facilitate the posting of messages so that others can find them easily. Without two-way communication, citizens at the receiving end of the wire are not merely passive but mute. In a society linked together by the NII, the capability of every individual to post messages will be the functional equivalent of the freedom in the world before electronic media to stand on a corner and speak one's mind.

Freedom to communicate, however, does not mean freedom to intrude. The right to free speech must be balanced by the right not to listen. Given that many people now find unsolicited mail and telephone calls intrusive, it is easy to imagine that the NII might enable the production of an overwhelming amount of electronic "junk mail." It must not fall as a burden to the individual to sift through all such material to find the nuggets of desired communication. There must be ways for people to choose classes of messages they do and do not wish to receive.

VITAL CIVIC SECTOR

The American democratic system is designed to provide the opportunity for thoughtful, informed decision-making. To make that system work, citizens and public officials must have opportunities to understand each other's needs and desires. As it becomes our central communications mechanism, the NII must be designed to support this system of governance. The NII must provide service capabilities that encourage the spontaneous development of communities of all kinds. The primary requirement is a set of software tools specifically designed to facilitate the creation of self-defining groups of users. These groups will consist of people who want to discuss issues concerning their neighborhood, state, nation, or planet.

Individuals and groups must be enabled to participate in governmental decision-making at national, state, and local levels. To do so, they will need timely access to government information and pending policy decisions. They will also need the opportunity to participate directly in hearings and other public proceedings. With universal access and usability, the NII has the potential to reduce the distance between citizens and their government as nothing else can. Civic participation will enable citizens to help design regulation and legislation, not merely to appeal it or vote on it.

Schools and libraries play key roles in nurturing the civic sector. Not only should people be able to reach out into the NII from schools and libraries, but people should be able to reach into them from the NII. Classes and teachers at all levels from elementary schools to colleges should be reachable through the NII. Not just library catalogs but eventually the contents of the libraries should be accessible through this medium.

Making schools and libraries accessible from the NII serves two purposes. First, it enables life-long learning, not just for those of traditional student age, but for workers in need of retraining, for immigrants, for all who want to improve themselves. Second, it helps provide people with the information they need to be informed citizens.

DIVERSE AND COMPETITIVE MARKETPLACE

An open market for content is even more important than an open market for its carriers. The NII should ensure competition among ideas, products, and information providers. They should be able to compete because of their quality and not merely the marketing resources behind them. This means that individuals and small publishers must be enabled to be as visible in the marketplace as the large commercial institutions. The NII can allow individuals to act as their own publishers. The public can then decide whose program to watch, which software to run, and which databases to scan.

The NII has the opportunity of providing a level playing field where small businesses can more readily compete with large concerns. More diverse offerings allow for market innovations, experimentation, and the customization of products that economies of scale prohibit.

Referring to the NII as a marketplace of ideas does not, however, mean that providers must charge for their offerings. Publishers may decide that having their idea widely accepted is more important than making a profit. This happens often in the computer research community: much of the most popular software is the result of donated labor. Software publishers benefit by being able to share ideas with a wider community, by proving the validity of their research, or by satisfying their altruistic tendencies. The competition of their offerings with commercial products can only improve both.

EQUITABLE WORKPLACE

Although computers have become relatively common in the home, most people in the United States today are more directly affected by computing technology at work. For example, the widespread use of word processing has profoundly transformed the character of office work in the last fifteen years. During a similar period, the development of new techniques for factory automation has changed not only the nature of manufacturing jobs but also the availability and importance of such jobs in the national economy.

The NII, while it offers extraordinary opportunities for economic growth in global information, will also continue to transform the nature of work in our society. In sectors of the economy that generate and distribute information resources, job growth is likely. Other sectors, however, may continue to suffer job losses and the associated economic dislocation. For example, as the NII reduces the cost of international communication, it will become easier for companies to export certain jobs formerly done in the United States to countries with a lower wage rate. Similarly, the availability of new services on the NII may reduce the need for workers who now provide those services locally.

Too often in the past, new technologies have been introduced into the workplace with little concern for their effects on workers. In many cases, the introduction of computers has required workers to acquire new expertise and knowledge, raising the skill level needed for the job. In other cases, computers have had the opposite effect, reducing the level of job skill needed to such an extent that workers become merely agents of the machine. Without planning and foresight, such changes can have a negative effect on total productivity. Workers whose jobs suddenly require enhanced skills may not receive the additional training they need or any recognition to compensate for the increased responsibilities. At the other end of the spectrum, workers whose jobs have been deskilled lose a sense of personal investment in the process.

Since the NII will further change the nature of work in the United States in profound ways, its policies must be designed to address those changes. CPSR believes that workplace technology is best used to enhance, not replace, the skills of workers. Moreover, workplace systems themselves are more effective when workers participate actively in the design process.

PRIVACY

Privacy protection is a fundamental human right. The protection of privacy is all the more important in advanced communication networks where enormous amounts of personal information are generated and transferred. The ever-increasing capability of both existing and new technologies to accumulate and cross-reference personally identifying information constitutes a grave threat to personal privacy.

Proposed NII services should be carefully examined. New network services, if not properly designed, may easily diminish user privacy. Caller ID, for example, reduced the privacy of telephone customers and was opposed by consumers and state regulators. Users of the NII should also be permitted to use strong cryptography to protect communications. It is inappropriate and potentially dangerous for the integrity of the NII for the government to encourage communications services that facilitate wire surveillance.

CPSR believes that an NII privacy code should be developed and enforced. We have already recommended a set of principles that could help address many of the privacy concerns the NII will raise. These principles are:

1. The confidentiality of electronic communications should be protected.

2. Privacy considerations must be recognized explicitly in the provision, use and regulation of telecommunication services.

3. The collection of personal data for telecommunication services should be limited to the extent necessary to provide the service.

4. Service providers should not disclose information without the explicit consent of service users. Service providers should be required to make known their data collection practices to service users.

5. Users should not be required to pay for routine privacy protection. Additional costs for privacy should only be imposed for extraordinary protection.

6. Service providers should be encouraged to explore technical means to protect privacy.

7. Appropriate security polices should be developed to protect network communications.

8. A mechanism should be established to ensure the observance of these principles.

CPSR acknowledges the interest of corporate marketing and recognizes the public interest in both law enforcement and national security. However, we assert on principle the necessity of an NII policy that effectively resists the otherwise endless demands for personal information. Although privacy cannot always supersede other concerns, it is often possible to find a way to meet those other needs with a minimum of infringement.

DEMOCRATIC POLICY-MAKING

If the NII is to serve the needs of the public, the public must have input into its design. The public must help establish both the policy by which it is guided and the design through which it is implemented. Experience has shown that such involvement has been critical to the design of the most popular existing electronic systems. Effective participation is as important to computer systems as it is to government.

Traditionally, technologists have argued that only a strong central vision can produce elegant, consistent, complete designs. Citing examples of the failure of design by committee, they argue that technical design must be left to those who understand its complexities. Unfortunately, this approach tends to create complex systems that can be understood and used only by the technical elite.

New approaches, however, combine the centralized and decentralized models, obtaining the benefits of each while avoiding their deficiencies. These approaches can be applied to the design of a system and to the adoption of a standard.

In participatory design, the people who are expected to use the final product are involved from the early design stages through several iterations of testing the implementation. The system is implemented by a small team that works with a central design. Those who use the system contribute their own knowledge to the design by commenting on the goals and features to make sure the system is widely usable.

Just as participatory design allows systems to emerge after cycles of user input and testing, the same approach can be used to define new standards. The process begins with the formulation of an experimental standard. After a period of testing in its intended environment, comments are obtained and another iteration of design and testing begins. When the system is stable and both architects and users are satisfied, the standard is adopted. This approach has been used with great success by the Internet Society and the X Consortium, which has developed a window system used today by most of the major workstation vendors.

Both participatory design and the experimental approach to standardization achieve the benefits of democratic input to design and policy-making without sacrificing the technical advantages of consistency and elegance of design.

FUNCTIONAL INTEGRITY

The NII must be engineered to high standards of reliability, functional capability, and extensibility. In time, the NII will encompass all the nation's telecommunications. As it becomes the primary conduit for economic transactions and long-distance medicine, businesses and people will trust the NII with their economic livelihood and, perhaps, their lives. We will demand a system that works under heavy loads and in natural disasters. Failures will occur, but they should be localized, not system-wide. Recovery must be swift -- a matter of minutes or hours, not days or weeks. We will not be able afford to turn off the whole system to maintain or upgrade it, but we will not tolerate it becoming antiquated. Infrastructure must be there when you need it.

Anyone who has worked with today's computer systems knows that they have not achieved this level of dependability. Their limitations are partly the result of economic priorities. It costs a lot of money to design a highly reliable system. That cost must be balanced against the cost of system failure. But the major reason computer systems, particularly software systems, are unreliable is that we do not know how to design them to be more reliable. A large software systems is so complicated that no one person can understand it all. Yet the system is often so fragile that one programming flaw, one misplaced comma, can bring the whole system crashing down, or send a satellite flying out of control.

Setting high standards for the engineering will push us, as designers and implementers, to find new ways to improve the quality of computer software. That we have failed to do better to date shows that the task will not be easy. But when we understand that the NII is vital to the economic and perhaps the physical health of the nation, it becomes clear that we must challenge ourselves to do our best.

3.2 POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

Government is the institution through which we come together to set collective priorities, to organize our resources for the common good, to set the rules under which we wish to live. For all its problems, government is essential. If the NII is left entirely to private enterprise, it may become nothing more than a vehicle for entertainment, finance, shopping, and advertising -- to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, "500 channels with nothing on." It is only through government action that we will preserve a public-interest component of the NII beyond these commercial interests.

P1. CONSIDER THE SOCIAL IMPACT

We agree with the Administration that implementation of the NII will have far-reaching effects. The infrastructure will change society both in ways we can predict and in ways we cannot. Unless we understand these changes, we cannot hope to control them. Therefore, we recommend that a portion of both the initial funding and the maintenance funding be set aside for research into the social impact of the NII.

P2. GUARANTEE EQUITABLE AND UNIVERSAL ACCESS

Universal access to the NII is required to ensure that society does not become divided into the information-poor and the information-rich. Because access to information is critical in the modern world, we believe that the NII will become the primary medium for political and economic participation. To limit people's access because they are physical disabled, economically disadvantaged, or geographically remote is unacceptable in a democracy. We anticipate that a network implemented solely on free-market principles would not reach all citizens. No single commercial institution finds it financially worthwhile to provide service to the marginal users. Today's telecommunication system fails to support all citizens adequately, and the NII will be built from much the same technology. Yet all will benefit, both economically and politically, by universal service.

Access will require not merely a connection to the NII, but the hardware to use that connection. A telephone wire to one's house is useless if one cannot afford a telephone. What the user's equipment will look like remains to be determined: it may be a computer terminal or some completely new device, but we must find a way to offer access to everyone at an affordable, perhaps subsidized, price.

P3. PROMOTE WIDESPREAD ECONOMIC BENEFITS

From the two major position papers the Administration has released concerning the NII, it is clear that they intend it to benefit all sectors of the U.S. economy. We are concerned that in estimating and measuring the impact of policy alternatives, there will be a tendency to consider only the most readily quantifiable aspects, such as the effect on the telecommunications and information industries. There are likely to be cases, such as the establishment of rate structures, in which the interests of these two industries is not precisely aligned with the interests of the nation as a whole. We call for the foresight and breadth of vision to see beyond short-term, narrow interests to enduring national needs.

In considering the structure of the NII, one of the crucial public- policy issues is how its construction and operation will be financed. In the current debate, the prevailing assumption is that as much of the service as possible should be privatized in the interests of economic efficiency. Economists, however, have long recognized that certain conditions are necessary for a free market. When those conditions do not exist, market failures can occur. In the case of the NII, several factors -- its status as a public good, the high cost of entry into the carrier market, the existence of both positive and negative externalities in its operation -- are predictors of market failure. Speaking at a conference on "Public Access to the Internet" at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in May 1993, economist Sandra Schickele pointed out that "the assumptions which must hold if the free market is to be efficient are fundamentally violated by the nature of the Internet and any likely successor to it, and that market prices cannot by themselves efficiently allocate resources for the production and use of the Internet." Government planners must be sensitive to this danger and intervene as necessary.

P4. PROMOTE DIVERSITY IN CONTENT MARKETS

The public benefits from exposure to a diverse marketplace of ideas. Can market forces alone foster this diversity of content on the NII, or will it need a champion? As long as information providers are able to reach their public, they have no further interest in diversity. In fact, they have an economic motivation to raise barriers that keep others from entering the market. Moreover, as long as their networks are saturated, carriers are indifferent to the number of content providers. If no one has an economic motivation to ensure diversity, market forces alone cannot suffice.

The early history of the railroads offers an instructive parallel. Even though the railway expansion greatly benefited the nation by the end of the 1800s, the economic process of achieving those benefits was hardly smooth. For many years, railroads operated in an environment with no regulations against monopolies or discriminatory pricing. Through an extensive network of trusts and discriminatory tariff structures mandating higher rates for short hauls than longer ones, railroad companies enriched themselves at the expense of the economy as a whole. Outrage against them led to the formation of the Independent Farmers' Association and the Grange movement, which in turn led Congress to establish the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 and to enact the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890.

P5. PROVIDE ACCESS TO GOVERNMENT SERVICES AND INFORMATION OVER THE NII

We applaud the Administration's intention to use the NII to create a government that is "more cost-effective, efficient, and 'user- friendly.'" While technology is not a quick fix for social problems, it can enable the flow of information and democratic empowerment needed to address these problems. For example, individuals need access to social services, public information, legal records, census and agricultural data; the ability to inspect and correct government records about themselves; and information on pending public-policy decisions and the ability to comment on them. Moreover, to be equitable, we must not only provide these services through the NII, but also guarantee universal access to them.

P6. PROTECT PUBLIC SPACES

We mean many things when we speak of public space on the NII. There must be areas that are publicly owned. Anyone must be able to post messages, confident that the content of those messages are protected by First Amendment guarantees of free speech. The NII should offer an arena for public discussion. Public spaces may also be the venue for interchange with local, state, and federal government agencies. Pending legislation and regulations could be posted there along with people's comments. Public spaces also allow developers to offer free noncommercial software to a wide audience.

It will take funding to maintain these public spaces. Possible models for funding include surcharges on profits for information providers, royalty fees for the use of publicly collected data, profits for carriers, or tax abatement to donators of public space. Recommending a particular model is beyond the scope of this report, but we strongly urge the Administration to consider the various possibilities.

P7. ENCOURAGE DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION

For reasons of both principle and expedience, we believe that decisions affecting the public's use of the NII must be made openly and democratically. The principle of government for, of, and by the people demands public involvement in the design of so vital an infrastructure. Anything that will have such an impact on our lives and the social structure of our nation should be a matter for public consideration. Further, we believe that the infrastructure will be easier to use and more beneficial if the intended users, the public at large, have input into its design.

P8. THINK GLOBALLY

An information infrastructure will obtain its maximum economic, social, and cultural benefits when it is world-wide in scope. We cannot, of course, mandate the global adoption of the U.S. infrastructure. We cannot control other nations, and choices that meet our cultural needs may be inappropriate elsewhere. Nonetheless, we can design the NII so that it does not create barriers to global communication. Currently, our national standards set a lower threshold for the protection of individual privacy than do the laws of other countries. These countries consequently restrict the flow of data records into our country. If we work to establish comparable standards, both individual privacy and global communication will be enhanced. Similar issues exist in the areas of security, censorship, and tariffs.

P9. GUARANTEE FUNCTIONAL INTEGRITY

The government has a compelling interest in making sure that the NII meets its design goals. As with other parts of the national infrastructure, the government must at times establish regulatory mechanisms to ensure that basic standards are upheld. Government intervention is particularly critical when market forces act to favor individual companies rather than the public good. For example, regulation may be required to ensure that standards remain open, that basic service is available to all at reasonable cost, that privacy is protected, and that citizens have access to public information.

In most cases, the areas in which government may need to take action correspond to those for which CPSR has developed design recommendations. The specific challenges that may arise are discussed in more detail in the sections that follow. Our purpose in including this recommendation in the policy section is to emphasize that the process of guaranteeing that technical requirements are met is an issue of public policy as well as of design.

3.3 DESIGN RECOMMENDATIONS

As computer professionals, the members of CPSR have considerable experience in systems design and the use of network technology. This experience leads us to make several recommendations to the designers of the NII, who must ensure that the system is technically capable of meeting its intended goals. These recommendations, briefly articulated in Part 1, are expanded in the sections that follow.

D1. EMPHASIZE EASE OF USE

The single most important failing of the Internet today is that it is extremely hard to use for those lacking a certain level of technical expertise. The Internet was designed by computer programmers for themselves and their colleagues; its style of use reflects that history. New users are faced with an overwhelming collection of network resources and tools for getting at them. Only in the last several years have service providers begun to tackle the problem of reducing the complexity of using the network.

Building a system that is simple for users and yet gives them access to the full range of data and services available on the NII is an extremely difficult challenge. Moreover, it is a challenge too important, complex, and open-ended to be left in the hands of a small group of technical experts. Millions of people will use the NII. Millions more will be affected by its presence. That constituency needs to be brought into the design process. Doing so will require rethinking the traditional approach to setting policy and designing systems. In addition, it will require finding ways to ensure that people of different levels of technical expertise can participate in a meaningful way. We believe that the NII must be easier to use than a VCR, possibly as simple as the telephone.

D2. PROVIDE FULL SERVICE TO HOMES, WORKPLACES, AND COMMUNITY CENTERS

The NII is often described as a superhighway for data. For most people in the United States, however, that superhighway will only be useful if they can reach it from where they live and work. In designing an NII that serves the public interest, it is not enough to consider only the network "backbone" -- the high-speed data channels that serve as an analogue to the Interstate highway system. It will also be necessary to focus as well on the connections between the superhighways and the individual user -- the secondary roadways and streets that form the "last mile" of the information infrastructure. Completing the last mile of the NII is a significant undertaking that will require considerable investment from both the public and private sectors. Moreover, the goal of universal connection will not happen overnight. Even so, it is important to make such connection a national priority and to design the NII itself on that basis.

Unfortunately, it is easy to imagine that early designs of the NII could fail to place sufficient emphasis on the problem of bringing connections directly to the home. Carrier companies may focus instead on the data superhighway, which is certain to offer a higher return on their investment. The U.S. Post Office and the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) have found that they lose money on home delivery. Concentrating on high-volume services is more cost-effective. Unfortunately, such a strategy does not support the principle of universal access and would be unacceptable in the NII. The planners of the NII must recognize the importance of reaching the individual user and design the system accordingly, even though establishing those connections will certainly take time.

Beyond guaranteeing that the NII will reach into the home, it is also important that residential connections provide the full range of network functions. A design that offers a high level of service to companies that can afford a direct connection to the network backbone and a restricted, second-class form of service to individual residences is unacceptable. Such a system increases the disparity of power between the information-poor and the information-rich and runs counter to the principles of universal access, freedom to communicate, and democratic policy-making. The definition of full-function service will necessarily evolve with time. We realize that the bandwidth of the connections used for residential customers will certainly place some limits on what can be done initially, but it is nonetheless important to make high-quality, full-function, residential service a priority in the NII design.

To provide full-function service to all NII users, it is essential that

• The provision of high-level service to individual homes be made a priority
• The NII be designed to incorporate technological advances as they occur
• No arbitrary restrictions be placed on individual users that put them at a disadvantage in comparison to corporate users

D3. ENABLE ALL USERS TO ACT AS BOTH PRODUCERS AND CONSUMERS

One of the central requirements for full-function service is a two-way channel for communication. It is not enough to design a network that allows individual users to act only as passive consumers of information or entertainment. As is the case with today's Internet, every user of the NII must also have the option to generate new information and to publish that information through the network. Allowing users to act as producers as well as consumers has significant implications for the design of both the hardware and software for the NII.

To an extent, the desire to ensure that all users can become contributors flows from the principle of freedom to communicate. The network must not become like radio and television, where the few broadcast to the many. Individual voices must be heard on the NII, just as they are on the Internet today.

The desire to support individual contribution is also founded on the principle of a diverse and competitive marketplace. The evolution of the Internet in recent years has made it clear that the most valuable new ideas and technologies often come from individuals. The Internet of today is a community that sustains itself technologically. Because individual users feel invested in that community, they seek to make it better. They create their own information services, develop their own software tools, and build on the work of others to create a dynamic and evolving technology unlike any other. The individual initiative and entrepreneurship that characterize the Internet today must remain an essential element in the NII. Those contributions will drive the evolution of the NII itself and provide new value-added services.

D4. ADDRESS PRIVACY AND SECURITY ISSUES FROM THE BEGINNING

Privacy of communication is a fundamental precept that must guide the development of the NII. While the responsibility for ensuring privacy lies partly in the domain of policy, it also has technical ramifications. As is true for reliability, a computer system can ensure privacy only if the designers of that system make privacy a fundamental goal of the initial design.

D5. DEVELOP OPEN AND INTEROPERABLE STANDARDS

At one time in U.S. history, different railroads used tracks of different sizes. Doing so preserved corporate autonomy, but retarded the development of a national transportation system. In more recent times, computer manufacturers have also sought to retain a competitive advantage by developing and maintaining proprietary standards. Over the last decade, however, such tactics have backfired in the computing industry. Private standards make it difficult to connect computer systems supplied by different vendors and complicate the process of creating network software. Because clients today insist on being able to perform these functions, private standards drive those clients away. By adopting a public standard and encouraging its use, on the other hand, computer manufacturers can take rely on the broader computing community to create new tools based on the open standard.

The same effect is certain to apply in the design of the NII. The Internet today has been successful in large measure because it provides an open standard that permits systems of different types to communicate. By providing an open and interoperable standard, the Internet makes it easy for new machines and networks to become part of an ever-expanding webs. Moreover, as the Internet grows, the incentive to conform to its standards increases. Since the NII will be much larger than today's Internet, the importance of using open standards for equipment and protocols will be even greater than it is today.

Open standards are also essential to maintain a diverse and competitive marketplace. In an environment as large and as distributed as the NII, proprietary standards can only increase the pressure toward monopolistic concentration, which would work against both competition and diversity.

D6. ENCOURAGE EXPERIMENTATION AND EVOLUTION

Although open standards are essential to the success of the NII, it is also important to recognize the dangers of premature standardization. Because no one can predict with certainty how network usage will evolve, standards must not simply be imposed but instead allowed to evolve. Designers of the NII must not rush to adopt a single transmission medium or software model as a standard. They should instead experiment with trial approaches to find out what does and does not work.

Such experimentation must continue throughout the evolution of the NII. The NII is far too important for us to wait until the perfect solution has been developed. It is critical to begin with what is possible, make those capabilities available to the American people, and then build on that foundation. Throughout the process, the design must be flexible enough to accommodate new technologies and changing patterns of use.

D7. REQUIRE HIGH RELIABILITY

As a crucial part of the nation's infrastructure, the NII must be reliable. We expect, for example, bridges, roadways, and the other familiar parts of the national infrastructure to be kept in working order through periodic maintenance and to serve reliably when needed.

The NII, however, is different in many respects from the other parts of the infrastructure. More than any other product of engineering, computer systems are susceptible to failure. Although hardware flaws certainly occur in complex systems, software errors represent a greater danger. A single software error can lead to catastrophic failure, particularly in a complex, distributed systems like the NII. Moreover, such errors can sometimes remain undetected through years of testing and use, only to arise when a particular set of conditions occurs.

In a system as large and sophisticated as the NII, it is impossible to eliminate all software errors. Moreover, because the NII must support experimentation and growth, software errors will be a recurring problem as the system evolves. Even so, good software engineering practice and careful attention to reliability in the design phase can reduce the likelihood of critical failures and minimize their effects. To keep software errors to a minimum, however, it is essential to address reliability issues early in the design process and to keep them in the foreground of the project. The history of software development shows that it is extremely difficult to introduce high reliability into a system for which it was not an initial design Goal.

CPSR would like to thank those individuals and organizations who have helped with our work on the National Information Infrastructure, particularly Gary Bass, Laura Breeden, Vint Cerf, Jeff Chester, Charles Firestone, Sonia Jarvis, Ken Kay, Donald Lindberg, Jamie Love, Bruce McConnell, Mike Nelson, the Deer Creek Foundation, the HKH Foundation, the Markle Foundation, and the Scherman Foundation.

However, the views expressed in this report are those of CPSR and do not necessarily reflect the views of those individuals and organizations.

Abramson, Jeffrey, F. Christopher Arteron, and Gary Orren. The Electronic Commonwealth. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

Anderson, Christoper. "The Rocky Road to a Data Highway." Science, May 21, 1993.

Bogart, Leo. "Shaping a New Media Policy." The Nation, July 12, 1993.

Bollier, David. "The Information Superhighway: Roadmap for Renewed Public Purpose." Tikkun, July/August 1993.

Brody, Herb. "Information highway: the home front." Technology Review, August/September 1993.

Chapman, Gary, and Marc Rotenberg. "The National Information Infrastructure: A Public Interest Opportunity." CPSR Newsletter, Summer 1993.

Chapman, Gary, and Joel Yudkin. Setting a New Course for Science and Technology Policy. CPSR 21st Century Project, 1993.

Clinton, President William J., and Vice President Albert Gore. "Technology for America's Growth: A New Direction to Build Economic Strength." Washington, DC: White House, 1993

Commission, Carnegie. Enabling the Future: Linking Science and Technology to Societal Goals. Carnegie Commission, 1992.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Civil Liberties and the Electronic Frontier: Mapping the Terrain. 1991.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Civilizing Cyberspace: Minding the Matrix. 1991.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Electronic Mail to the President: receommendations to the New Administration from the Computing Community. ftp.cpsr.org: 1993.

Computers Systems Policy Project. Perspectives on the National Information Infrastructure: CSPP's Vision and Recommendations for Action. Washington: CSPP, 1993.

Council of State Governments, National Conference of State Legislatures, National Governor's Association, State Information Policy Consortium. "A National Information and Service Delivery System: A Vision for Restructuring Government." 1992.

CPSR Berkeley Chapter. "A Computer and Information Technology Platform." (1992).

DeLoughry, Thomas J. "NSF releases long-awaited plan to reduce U.S. role in the Internet." The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 26, 1993.

EDUCOM. "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities." EDUCOM Review, May/June 1993.

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Kahin, Brian, ed. Information Infrastructure Sourcebook. Cambridge: Information Infrastructure Project, Science, Technology and Public Policy Program, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 1993.

Kapor, Mitch. "Where is the Digital Highway Really Heading: The Case for a Jeffersonian Information Policy." Wired, July/August 1993.

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Love, James P. "Information policy for the Clinton/Gore administration: a viewpoint." Government Publications Review, 1993.

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Additional materials on the National Information Infrastructure, technology policy, and privacy and civil liberties are available at the CPSR FTP site cpsr.org.

The mission of CPSR is to provide the public and policymakers with realistic assessments of the power, promise, and problems of information technology. As concerned citizens, CPSR members work to direct public attention to critical choices concerning the applications of information technology and how those choices affect society.

Founded in 1981 by a group of computer scientists concerned about the use of computers in nuclear weapons systems, CPSR has grown into a national public-interest alliance of information technology professionals and others. Currently, CPSR has 22 chapters in the U.S. and affiliations with similar groups worldwide. In addition to our National Office in Palo Alto, California, we maintain an office in Washington, D.C., which is home to our Civil Liberties and Privacy program.

CPSR PROJECTS

As computer technology becomes increasingly pervasive, the issues facing us become more complex. CPSR provides a forum where we can examine technology's impact on our lives, the lives of our fellow citizens, and society as a whole. By sponsoring both national and local projects, CPSR serves as a catalyst for in-depth discussion and effective action in key areas:

• The National Information Infrastructure
• Civil Liberties and Privacy
• Computers in the Workplace
• Technology Policy and Human Needs
• Reliability and Risk of Computer-Based Systems

In addition, CPSR's chapter-based projects and national working groups tackle issues ranging from Calling Number ID systems to the development of nanotechnology and virtual reality, from the use of computers in education to working conditions for computer professionals, from community networks to computer ethics.

MEMBERSHIP BENEFITS

When you become a member of CPSR, you are joining a nationwide network of computer professionals who are committed to bringing social responsibility to all aspects of information technology. CPSR sponsors, supports, and participates in conferences, roundtables and meetings on advanced issues in computing, local civic networks, cryptography, participatory design, and computers and social change. Other member benefits include:

• A quarterly newsletter containing in-depth analysis of major issues as well as updates on CPSR activities and action alerts,

• Invitations and discounts to CPSR events and publications,

• An organized voice for socially responsible computing in Washington, D.C.,
• On-line information and discussion of key issues in computing,
• The chance to participate in chapter activities and work groups which allow you to have effective impact on the issues you care about,
• Information and referral about crucial issues in computing.

WHO CAN JOIN CPSR?

CPSR welcomes everyone who uses or is concerned about the role of information technology in our society. For more information, send email to cpsr@cpsr.org or call 415-322-3778.