The NREN as test-bed for a National Public Network

Mitchell D. Kapor is familiar to most readers as the founder of one of the PC industry’s most successful startups: Lotus Development Corp. Most recently, Kapor has been making waves with an equally high-profile startup: the Electronic Frontier Foundation. A co-founder of EFF, he is deeply involved in the political and ethical discussions about civilizing the “electronic frontier” of telecommunications.

While tracking the progress of the High Performance Computing and National Research and Education Network Act of 1991 this summer, Kapor wrote a detailed accounting of how to prevent the NREN from solely serving the scientific and educational communities. Instead, he believes the NREN could demonstrate how a broadband network can be used to benefit the general public.

The piece below is only a small excerpt from Kapor’s excellent treatise. A complete version is available by contacting Kapor via the Internet, mkapor@eff.org, or by writing to the EFF office at 155 Second Street, Cambridge, MA 02141.

A debate has begun about the future of America’s communications infrastructure. At stake is the future of the web of information links organically evolving from computer and telephone systems. By the end of the next decade, these links will connect nearly all homes and businesses in the U.S. They will serve as the main channels for commerce, learning, education and entertainment in our society.

The new information infrastructure will not be created in a single step: neither by a massive infusion of public funds, nor with the private capital of a few tycoons, such as those who built the railroads. Rather the national, public broadband digital network will emerge from the “convergence” of the public telephone network, the cable television distribution system and other networks such as the Internet.

The United States Congress is now taking a critical step toward what I call the National Public Network (NPN), with its authorization of the National Research and Education Network (NREN, pronounced “en-ren”). Not only will the NREN meet the computer and communication needs of scientists, researchers, and educators, but also, if properly implemented, it could demonstrate how a broadband network can be used in the future.

NREN AS PROTOTYPE

Far from evolving into the whole of the National Public Network itself, the NREN is best thought of as a prototype for the NPN, which will emerge over time from the phone system, cable television, and many computer networks. But the NREN is a growth site which, unlike privately controlled systems, can be consciously shaped to meet public needs.

The NREN design and construction process is complex and will have significant effects on future communications infrastructure design. It has frequently been described as akin to building a house, with various layers of the network architecture compared to parts of the house. In an expanded view of this analogy, planning the NII (national information infrastructure) is like designing a large, urban city.

The NREN is a big new subdivision on the edge of the metropolis, reserved for researchers and educators. It is going to be built first and is going to look lonely out there in the middle of the pasture for a while. But the city will grow up around it in time, and as construction proceeds, the misadventures encountered in the NREN subdivision will not have to be repeated in others. And there will be many house designs, not just those the NREN families are comfortable with. The lessons we learn today in building the NREN will be used tomorrow in building the NII.

The coming implementation and design of the NREN offers us a critical opportunity to shape a small but important part of the National Public Network.

Visions of social benefits. At its best, the National Public Network would be the source of immense social benefits. As a means of increasing social cohesiveness, while retaining the diversity that is an American strength, the network could help revitalize this country’s business and culture. As Sen. Albert Gore has said, the new national network that is emerging is one of the “smokestack industries of the information age.” It will increase the amount of individual participation in common enterprise and politics. It could also galvanize a new set of relationships — business and personal — between Americans and the rest of the world.

The names and particular visions of the emerging information infrastructure vary from one observer to another. Sen. Gore calls it the “National Information Superhighway.” Prof. Michael Dertouzos of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laboratory for Computer Science imagines a “National Information Infrastructure [which] … would be a common resource of computer-communications services, as easy to use and as important as the telephone network, the electric power grid, and the interstate highways.”

I call it the National Public Network (NPN), in recognition of the vital role information technology has come to play in public life and all that it has to offer, if designed with the public good in mind.

HOW WILL WE USE A NATIONAL PUBLIC NETWORK?

To what uses can we reasonably expect people to put a National Public Network? We don’t know. Indeed, we probably can’t know — the users of the network will surprise us. That’s exactly what happened in the early days of the personal computer industry, when the first spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, spurred sales of the Apple II computer. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did not design the spreadsheet; they did not even conceive of it. They created a platform which allowed someone else to bring the spreadsheet into being, and all the parties profited as a result, including the users.

Based on today’s systems, however, we can make a few educated guesses about the National Public Network. We know that, like the telephone, it will serve both business and recreation needs, as well as offering crucial community services. Messaging will be popular: time and time again, on systems ranging from the ARPAnet to Prodigy, people have surprised network planners with their eagerness to exchange mail. “Mail” will not just mean voice and text, but also pictures and video — no doubt with many new variations. One might imagine two people poring over a manuscript from opposite ends of the country, marking it up simultaneously and seeing each other’s markings appear on the screen.

We know from past demand on the Internet and commercial personal computer networks that the network will be used for electronic assembly — virtual town halls, village greens, and coffee houses, again taking place not just through shared text (as in today’s computer networks), but with multimedia transmissions, including images, voice, and video. Unlike the telephone, this network will also be a publications medium, distributing electronic newsletters, video clips, and interpreted reports.

OPENING THE FLOODGATES

We can speculate but cannot be sure about novel uses of the network. An information marketplace will include electronic invoicing, billing, listing, brokering, advertising, comparison-shopping, and matchmaking of various kinds. “Video on demand” will not just mean ordering current movies, as if they were spooling down from the local videotape store, but opening floodgates to vast new amounts of independent work, with high quality thanks to plummeting prices of professional-quality desktop video editors. Customers will grow used to dialing up two-minute demos of homemade videos before ordering the full program and storing it on their own blank tape.

There will be other important uses of the network as a simulation medium for experiences which are impossible to obtain in the mundane world. If scientists want to explore the surface of a molecule, they’ll do it in simulated form, using wrap-around three-dimensional animated graphics that create a convincing illusion of being in a physical place. This visualization of objects from molecules to galaxies is already becoming an extraordinarily powerful scientific tool. Networks will amplify this power to the point that these simulation tools take their place as fundamental scientific apparatus alongside microscopes and telescopes. Less exotically, a consumer or student might walk around the inside of a working internal combustion engine — without getting burned.

Building communities. Perhaps the most significant change the National Public Network will afford us is a new mode of building communities — as the telephone, radio, and television did. People often think of electronic “communities” as far-flung communities of interest between followers of a particular discipline. But we are learning, through examples like the PEN system in Santa Monica and the Old Colorado City system in Colorado Springs, that digital media can serve as a local nexus, an evanescent meeting-ground, that adds levels of texture to relationships between people in a particular locale.

To both local and long-distance communities, accessible digital communications will be increasingly important; by the end of this decade, the “body politic,” the “body social,” and the “body commercial” of this country will depend on a nervous system of fiber-optic lines and computer switches.

But whatever details of the vision and names given to the final product, a network that is responsive to a wide spectrum of human needs will not evolve by default. Just as it is necessary for an architect to know how to make a home suitable for human habitation, it is necessary to consider how humans will actually use the network in order to design it.

SOME RECOMMENDATIONS

In that spirit, I offer a set of recommendations for the evolution of the National Public Network. I first encountered many of the fundamental ideas underlying these proposals in the computer networking community. Some of these recommendations address immediate concerns; others are more long-term. There is a focus on the role of public access and commercial experiments in the NREN, which complement its research and education mission.

The recommendations are organized here according to the main needs which they will serve: first, ensuring that the design and use of the network remains open to diversity; second, safeguarding the freedom of users. The ultimate goal is to develop a habitable, usable and sustainable system — a nation of electronic neighborhoods that people will feel comfortable living within.

I. ENCOURAGE COMPETITION AMONG CARRIERS

In the context of the NREN, act now to create a level and competitive playing field for private network carriers (whether for-profit or not-for-profit) to compete. Do not give a monopoly to any carrier. The growing network must be a site where competitive energy produces innovation for the public benefit, not the refuge of monopolists. The greatest danger is “balkanization,” in which the net is broken up into islands, each developing separately, without enough interconnecting bridges to satisfy users’ desires for universal connectivity.

Strong interoperability requirements and adherence to standards must be built into the design of the NREN from the outset. For example, the National Science Foundation could make funding to NREN backbone carriers contingent on participation in an internetwork exchange agreement that would serve as a framework for a standards-based environment. As the NREN is implemented, some formal affirmation of fair access is needed — ideally by an “Internet Exchange Association” formed to settle common rules and standards.

II. CREATE AN OPEN PLATFORM FOR INNOVATION

Encourage information entrepreneurship through an open architecture (non-proprietary) platform, with low barriers to entry for information providers.

In the design of the NREN, information entrepreneurship can best be promoted by building with open standards, and by making the network attractive to as many service providers and developers as possible. The standards adopted must meet the needs of a broad range of users, not just narrow needs of the mission agencies that are responsible for overseeing the early stages of the NREN.

Policies for the NPN should therefore not only accommodate existing information industry interests, but anticipate and promote the next generation of entrepreneurs. It should be as easy to provide an information service as to order a business telephone.

No discrimination. Large and small information providers will probably coexist as they do in book publishing, where the players range from multi-billion-dollar international conglomerates to firms whose head office is a kitchen table. They can coexist because everyone has access to production and distribution facilities — printing presses, typography, and the U.S. mails and delivery services — on a nondiscriminatory basis. No one can guarantee when an application as useful as the spreadsheet will emerge for the NPN (as it did for personal computers), but open architecture is the best way for it to happen and let it spread when it does.

Just before the NREN bill was passed by Congress, under pressure from the D.C. Court of Appeals, Judge Harold Greene lifted the information services restrictions on the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) imposed during the divestiture of AT&T in 1982 — despite the competitive tension among the telephone companies, cable TV carriers, and newspapers.

With all of the uncertainty that surrounds the RBOCs’ entry into the information services market, we should use the NREN to learn how to develop a network environment where competitive entry is easy enough that the RBOCs’ opportunity to engage in anti-competitive behavior would be minimized. Since the NREN standards and procedures can be designed away from the dominance of the RBOCs, a fully open network design is within reach. In this sense, the NREN can be a test-bed for “safeguards” against market abuse just as it is a test ground for new technical standards and innovative network applications.

III. ENCOURAGE PRICING FOR UNIVERSAL ACCESS

Congressman Edward Markey, Chairman of the Subcommittee of Telecommunications and Finance of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, warns that as information services proliferate, “the challenge before us is how to make them available swiftly to the largest number of Americans at costs which don’t divide the society into information haves and havenots and in a manner which does not compromise our adherence to the long-cherished principles of diversity, competition and common carriage.”

To address this problem in the long term, Sen. Conrad Burns has proposed that the universal service guarantee statement in the Communications Act of 1934 be amended to include access to “a nation-wide, advanced, interactive, interoperable, broadband communications system available to all people, businesses, services, organizations, and households … .”

In the near term, the NREN can serve as a laboratory for testing a variety of pricing and access schemes in order to determine how best to bring basic network services to large numbers of users. The NREN platform should facilitate the offering of fee-based services for individuals.

Cable TV is one good model: joining a service requires an investment of $100 for a TV set, which 99% of households already own, about $50 for a cable hookup, and perhaps $15 per month in basic service. Similarly, a carrier providing connection to the mature National Public Network might charge a one-time startup fee and then a low fixed monthly rate for access to basic services, which would include a voice telephone capability.

Open architecture could help phone companies offer lower rates for digital services. If opportunities and incentives exist for information entrepreneurs, they will create the services which will stimulate demand, increase volume, and create more revenue-generating traffic for the carriers. In a competitive market, with higher volumes, lower prices follow.

IV. MAKE THE NETWORK SIMPLE TO USE

The ideal means of accessing the NPN will not be a personal computer as we know it today, but a much simpler, streamlined information appliance — a hybrid of the telephone and the computer.

“Transparency” is the Holy Grail of software designers. When a program is perfectly transparent, people forget about the fact that they are using a computer. The mechanics of the program no longer intrude on their thoughts. The most successful computer programs are nearly always transparent: a spreadsheet, for instance, is as self-evident as a ledger page.

Personal computer communications, by contrast, are practically opaque. Users must be aware of baud rates, parity, duplex, and file transfer protocols — all of which a reasonably well-designed network could handle for them. It’s as if, every time you wanted to drive to the store, you had to open up the hood and adjust the sparkplugs. On a National Public Network, this invites failure. People without the time to invest in learning arcane commands would simply not participate. The network would become needlessly exclusionary.

Part of the NREN goal of “expand[ing] the number of researchers, educators, and students with … access to high performance computing resources” is to make all network applications easy to use. As the experience of the personal computer industry has shown, the only way to bring information resources to large numbers of people is with simple, easy-to-learn tools. The NREN can be a place where various approaches to user-friendly networks are tested and evaluated.

V. DEVELOP STANDARDS OF INFORMATION PRESENTATION

The National Public Network will need an integrated suite of high-level standards for the exchange of richly formatted and structured information, whether as text, graphics, sound, or moving images. Use the NREN as a test-bed for a variety of information presentation and exchange standards on the road towards an internationally accepted set of standards for the National Public Network.

Congress has provided that the National Institute of Standards and Technology “shall adopt standards and guidelines … for the interoperability of high-performance computers in networks and for common user interfaces to systems.” As the implementation of the NREN moves forward, we must ensure that standards development remains both a public and private priority. Failure to make a commitment to an environment with robust standards, said D. Allan Bromley, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, would be “the beginning of a Tower of Babel that we can ill afford.”

VI. PROMOTE FIRST AMENDMENT FREE EXPRESSION BY AFFIRMING THE PRINCIPLES OF COMMON CARRIAGE

In a society which relies more and more on electronic communications media as its primary conduit for expression, full support for First Amendment values requires extension of the common carrier principle to all of these new media.
Common carriers are companies which provide conduit services for the general public. They include railroads, trucking companies, and airlines as well as telecommunications firms. A communications common carrier, such as a telephone company, is required to provide its services on a non-discriminatory basis. A telephone company has no liability for the content of a phone call. Neither can it arbitrarily deny service to anyone.

The common carrier’s duties have evolved over hundreds of years in the common law and later statutory provisions. The carriers of the NREN and the National Public Network, whether telephone companies, cable television companies, or other firms, should be treated in a similar fashion.

Given Congress’s plan to build the NREN with services from privately owned carriers, a legislatively imposed duty of common carriage for NREN carriers is necessary to protect free expression effectively. As Professor Eli Noam, a former New York State Public Utility Commissioner, explains, “Common carriage is the practical analog to [the] First Amendment for electronic speech over privately owned networks, where the First Amendment does not necessarily govern directly.”

The controlled environment of the NREN should be taken advantage of to experiment with various open access, common carriage rules and enforcement mechanisms to seek regulatory alternatives other than what has evolved in the public telephone system.

New publishing opportunities. Along with promoting free expression, common carriage rules are important for ensuring a competitive market in information services on the National Public Network. The same advances in computing which created desktop publishing are delivering “desktop video” which will make it affordable for the smallest business, agency, or group to create video consumables. The NPN must incorporate a distribution system of individual choice for the video explosion.

If the cable company wants to offer a package of program channels, it should be free to do so. But so should anyone else. There will continue to be major demand for mass-market video entertainment, but the vision of the NPN should not be limited to this form of content. Anyone who wishes to offer services to the public should be guaranteed access over the same fiber-optic cable under the principle of common carriage. From this access will come the entrepreneurial innovation, and this innovation will create the new forms of media that exploit the interactive, multimedia capabilities of the NPN.

VII. PROTECT PERSONAL PRIVACY

The infrastructure of the NPN should include mechanisms that support the privacy of information and communication. Building the NREN is an opportunity to test various data encryption schemes and study their effectiveness for a variety of communications needs.

Technologies have been developed over the past 20 years which allow people to safeguard their own privacy. One tool is public-key encryption, in which an “encoding” key is published freely, while the “decoder” is kept secret. People who wish to receive encrypted information give out their public key, which senders use to encrypt messages. Only the possessor of the private key has the ability to decipher the meaning.

The privacy of telephone conversations and electronic mail is already protected by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Legal guarantees are not enough, however. Although it is technically illegal to listen in on cellular telephone conversations, as a practical matter the law is unenforceable. Imported scanners capable of receiving all 850 cellular channels are widely available through the gray market.

Cellular telephone transmissions are carried on radio waves which travel through the open air. The ECPA provision which makes it illegal to eavesdrop on a cellular call is the wrong means to the right end. It sets a dangerous precedent in which, for the first time, citizens are denied the right to listen to open air transmissions. In this case, technology provides a better solution. Privacy protection would be greatly enhanced if public-key encryption technology were built into the entire range of digital devices, from telephones to computers. The best way to secure the privacy and confidentiality Americans say they want is through a combination of legal and technical methods.

As a system over which not only information but also money will be transferred, the National Public Network will have enormous potential for privacy abuse. Some of the dangers could be forestalled now by building in provisions for security from the beginning.

CONCLUSION

The chance to influence the shape of a new medium usually arrives when it is too late: when the medium is frozen in place. Today, because of the gradual evolution of the National Public Network, and the unusual awareness people have of its possibilities, there is a rare opportunity to shape this new medium in the public interest, without sacrificing diversity or financial return. As with personal computers, the public interest is also the route to maximum profitability for nearly all participants in the long run.

The major obstacle is obscurity: technical telecommunications issues are so complex that people don’t realize their importance to human and political relationships. But be this as it may, these issues are of paramount importance to the future of this society. Decisions and plans for the NPN are too crucial to be left to special interests. If we act now to be inclusive rather than exclusive in the design of the NPN, we can create an open and free electronic community in America. To fail to do so, and to lose this opportunity, would be tragic.

Mitchell D. Kapor