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Visions of the National Information Infrastructure

by Jeff Johnson
CPSR/Palo Alto

CPSR News Volume 12, Number 4: Fall 1994

In addition to receiving coverage in the mainstream media, the NII is a hot topic in policy circles. Policy journals and opinion magazines are full of articles presenting views about how the NII should or should not be structured, funded, designed, regulated, and so on. Washington D.C. and many state capitals are awash with policy papers and lobbyists peddling this or that industry, special-interest, or public-interest position on what the goals for the NII should be. The majority of these position statements, however, are abstract: they describe technology, espouse principles, provide policy guidelines, present goals, or warn of generalized dangers and problems. As a result, they are boring to most people except dedicated policy "works." Most members of the public and even policymakers simply won't read them. Even those whose eyes don't glaze over may have trouble envisioning an NII that follows the abstract recommendations. As a result, we are, to a greater extent than is desirable, stumbling blindly toward the unknown, rather than building an infrastructure that advances us toward a set of goals.

In an attempt to improve our foresight, this issue of The CPSR Newsletter focuses on concrete scenarios and visions of the NII. One of the articles included is a piece that I began writing last year, while CPSR's NII policy statement, Serving the Community: A Public- Interest Vision of the NII, was being prepared, with the intent that it might serve as a companion to the policy document. I thought that an expression of CPSR's proposed NII principles in terms of concrete scenarios would be more readable and clearer to many readers - me, for instance.

The article "Not a Highway, but a Place" appears in this issue because of a conversation I had with CPSR member Pavel Curtis after he read a draft of my article. Pavel is the creator of LambdaMoo, a very popular Internet "meeting place." He and his colleagues in the Jupiter Project at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center have a somewhat different vision of what the NII should be like, as their article's title suggests. These two contrasting collections of scenarios formed the kernel idea for this issue of The CPSR Newsletter.

The issue is rounded out with three other articles that present or discuss concrete visions of the NII:

• Using Today's Information Infrastructure The Federation of American Research Networks (FARNET) has been collecting, for the past few years, stories describing people's actual use of the Internet. Last year, FARNET published some of them in a book called 51 Reasons. To illustrate how the Internet, a precursor of the NII, is being used today, we included a few of those stories.
• The Future History of PepNet Last year, someone identified only as "The Salt Merchant" posted an article to several Internet newsgroups that presents a pessimistic view of the Internet's future. We reprint it here, with permission from the author. Readers who doubt this prophecy should consider the following developments, all of which occurred since the article was posted: Pizza Hut, owned by Pepsico, is testing PizzaNet, a service that allows people to order pizzas over the Internet; Home Shopping Network offers a shopping service via the Internet; an overhaul of the Internet's infrastructure has prompted businesses to press for a relaxation of the Internet's strict limits on advertising.
• What Consumers Want from the Information Infrastructure A recent issue of MacWorld included an article presenting the results of a "consumer survey" that asked what people thought they might use the NII for. David Bellin, a longtime CPSR activist and former Board member, has summarized and critiqued the MacWorld article for this issue.

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