[12243] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
re: NII and Reality
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven=Byrne%CFP%BTCE@smtpgate.dot)
Wed May 11 03:29:49 1994
Date: Wed, 11 May 94 14:49:30 EST
From: Steven=Byrne%CFP%BTCE@smtpgate.dotc.gov.au
To: com-priv@psi.com
Cc: stahlman@radiomail.net, EFDPMA@acm.org
Mark Stahlman (via RadioMail) <stahlman@radiomail.net> Wrote:
....
|
| I was wondering if there was any room for an open discussion
| at this event of whether there really is anything that could
| properly be called an NII (aside from a campaign slogan) and
| whether this rush of activity might produce undesirable federal
| intervention in new market growth?
|
| Since every major computer technology driven economic
| opportunity in the past 30 years has come from startup companies,
| how are the startups being represented at this conference? I'm
| a fairly well known analyst and commentator on these issues and
| I'm very frustrated at the extremely low level of reality
| awareness in much of the discussion around the NII.
|
| For instance, who thinks that the NII (as opposed to other
| ongoing network buildouts) will produce $300 billion in revenues?
| John Latta? Please help me out here, I'm beginning to be very
| concerned about the bandwagon that's being constructed for the
| Infobahn here.
|
| Mark Stahlman
| New Media Associates
| New York City
| stahlman@radiomail.net
|
Mark:
What are you concerned about exactly?
* The hype about the future cash-cow nature of the NII?
* The under-representation of start-ups and real technological innovators
at discussions about the NII and in shaping its development?
* The way the concept of an NII, as it has been so-far developed, seems to
open up new doors for government regulatory involvement in the
communications and computing industries?
If this is the tenor of your concerns, then I think many people share
them.
It is remarkable to me how few commentators have considered where the
present NII vision is taking the US long-term (and the world, by extension
- remember, it should now be thought of as the *Global* Information
Infrastructure or GII, according to Al Gore).
What we have all seen produced by the NII 'bandwagon' has been very
optimistic - technologically, economically, socially. Good questions to
ask are: what sort of a technological and regulatory spider-web is the NII
going to produce in the US in 10 years time? How will the role of the NII
bureaucrats evolve over the next 10 years? Is the current steerage of the
NII by Washington bureaucrats and industry heavyweights going to stifle
innovation in the development of the NII and produce something less than
optimal? What will the real economic effects of it be, and what will the
distribution of these effects look like?
But on the other hand I think the advent of the NII, and the high-profile
given to it by the US administration, is an extremely positive
development. Even if it may be considered to only exist as a slogan, it
has triggered a very useful sequence of developments in the market-place,
and focussed a lot of minds and resources on very serious issues for the
future of communications and computing that probably would not have been
considered but for the advent of the NII. If something is perceived as
real, it will be real in its consequences...
| | | | | | | ||||||||| | | | | | | | | |||||||| | | | | |||||| | | |
---------------------------------------------------------------------
| Steven Byrne. Communications Futures Project. Bureau of Transport |
| and Communications Economics. Canberra, Australia. |
| Internet: Steven=Byrne%cfp%btce@smtpgate.dotc.gov.au |
---------------------------------------------------------------------
