RFC 1527

What Should We Plan Given the Dilemma of the Network?

📅 published September 1993, from ietf

Part 1 of 5 🎀

What Should We Plan Given the Dilemma of the Network? 🦋

Okay bestie, let's start with the title block ✨ This is RFC 1527, from the Network Working Group, written by G. Cook of the Cook Report. It's dated September 1993 and filed as Informational, so it's info for the community, not a standard. The title block doesn't list any RFCs it obsoletes or updates.

Status of this Memo ✨

This memo is info for the Internet community, not a standard. Distribution is unlimited, so share it as much as you want 💜

Abstract 💖

Early last year, as the final project of an 18 month appointment at the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), I drafted a potential policy framework for Congressional action on the National Research and Education Network (NREN). 🌸

The Internet community needs to be asking what the most important policy issues facing the network are. And once we agree on a particular set of policy issues, the next thing we should be asking is, what political choices would follow for Congress to make? 🤔

It's unfortunate that this was never officially done for or by the Congress by OTA. What we have instead is network policy making being carried out by the Science Subcommittee on the House side, in consultation with a relatively small group of interested parties. The debate seems more focused on preserving turf than on any sweeping understanding of what the legislation is doing. That is unfortunate. 😭

In the hope that it may contain some useful ideas, I'm sharing a shortened version of the suggested policy draft as information for the Internet community. 🫶

Table of Contents 🍓

   The Dilemma of an Unregulated Public Resource in a Free Market
   Environment  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    2
   Regulation is a key NREN policy issue. . . . . . . . . . . . . .    3
   Technology Transfer Goals Achieved?  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    4
   The Context for Policy Setting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    4
   Whom Shall the Network Serve?  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    5
   Access to the NREN is a key policy issue . . . . . . . . . . . .    6
   How Far To Extend Network Access?  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    6
   A Corporation for Public Networking? . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    9
   Summary  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   14
   Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   17
   Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   17

The Dilemma of an Unregulated Public Resource in a Free Market Environment 💅

Okay so, as things are set up right now, the NSFnet and american Internet give access to several million researchers and educators, hundreds of thousands of remote computers, hundreds of databases, and hundreds of library catalogues. ✨ The money being put into the network through the High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) initiative should considerably increase the numbers and variety behind this unprecedented collection of resources. No other computer network on earth comes close to the breadth and depth of people and information this one offers. If access to information is access to power, then access to the national computer network means access to very significant power. 👑

Furthermore, access to the american Internet and NREN is also access to the worldwide Internet 🌈 According to the Director for International Programs at the NSF in February 1992, the Internet has grown exponentially over the past twelve years:

               Date           Connected Hosts

               August 1981    213
               October 1985   1,961
               December 1987  28,174
               January 1989   80,000
               January 1991   376,000
               January 1992   727,000

These hosts are computers that anyone in the world with Internet access can connect to instantly and use if there are publically available files. Any host may also be used for remote computing if the system administrator gives the user private access. These seven hundred thousand plus hosts are located in more than 38 nations. But they're only part of the picture! By system-to-system transfer of electronic mail, they're linked to probably a million additional hosts. 🧚 According to Dr. Larry Landweber of the University of Wisconsin, as of February 10, 1992, Internet electronic mail was available in 106 nations and territories. 🌍

Unfortunately, our current regulatory system doesn't tell apart the unique nature of the Internet and commercial systems like Prodigy and Compuserve. Perhaps a million people pay monthly fees for access to those systems, which offer a few dozen databases run from two or three hosts and electronic mail to several hundred thousand people, instead of many millions. (The picture is made somewhat fuzzy by the fact that Compuserve does provide electronic mail access to the Internet through a gateway, for an extra charge.) The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) considers all three to be Value Added Networks (VANs) run by Enhanced Service Providers. All of them use common carriers to provide their enhanced services, and the FCC, in refusing to regulate them, reasons that all services are roughly alike. 🙈 If, for example, Compuserve charges too much, the consumer can quit Compuserve and move to Prodigy. Or, if the monthly cost of Internet access became too much, access to Prodigy or Compuserve would be basically the same thing. Here, unfortunately, the analogy fails: the Internet now, and the NREN to be, with its unparalleled resources, is not the same. Nevertheless, the FCC points out that without Congressional action it is powerless to regulate NREN service providers. 💀

The Context for Policy Setting ✨

Congress needs to understand the context of a network that's commercializing fast 🚀 if it wants to make informed choices about goals for it, no cap. This context is likely to have serious impacts on the user community and on how future network technology gets developed 💅 It's also likely to make some goals way easier to hit than others. And honestly? Given how mature TCP/IP wide area networking technology is, commercialization is inevitable 🫶

Some people are already asking whether the government should be providing backbone services at all, since commercial alternatives already exist and are expected to multiply 👀

Supporters of the NREN vision argue that the NSF is using government funds to build a leading edge network faster than the commercial alternatives can. They say spending public money on this kind of technology development is appropriate ✨ Their critics say the T-3 technology (also called DS-3) is a dead end 💀 and that the next logical step is refining the network so it can use ATM and SONET. For aggregate gigabit speeds along the backbone, ATM and SONET will be necessary. The critics claim the T-1 backbone could be engineered to accommodate the network for a while longer, while Federal funds would be better invested right now in an ATM and SONET development effort. They also say Federal policy is being used to give IBM a testbed for developing DS-3 TCP/IP routers, even though Network Technologies makes a comparable product that is already proven and reliable 😤 Whether the Federal Government should be providing backbone services or merely support for access and improved network features is a key policy issue 🔥

Finding the best answer is likely to center on whether the Federal mission agencies involved in high speed network development can articulate a long term plan for new network technology over the next decade 📋 How we use what's learned in the gigabit testbeds hasn't been clearly addressed by policy makers yet. Continuation of the testbeds is currently uncertain 🥺 and there's no plan to apply the outcome to the production NREN either. These are areas that deserve 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 likely make a chaotic situation even more so 😬 However, focused planning could define potentially productive alternatives to current policies, ones 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 Congress on goals for the network's eventual privatization 📑 Thanks to the NSF's decision to rebid the backbone, this task may no 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 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 adding many of the expensive capabilities promoted by the advocates of the NREN vision to the network? 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, 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? 🌸

Okay bestie, the NREN vision is getting so much attention 😭 and now people who were never really meant to be on the network are like, "wait, what about us??" 💅 An avid group of educators who want to use the network for K-12 education has popped up. If commercialization brought big price increases, it could literally endanger the access these educators already have. 🥺

Native Americans have started asking for network access too. So how will Congress respond to them? And what about the general library community? They've been avidly pushing for NREN funds with the Coalition for Networked Information 📚 Then there are state and local government networks, too 👀

Congress should recognize that choices about network access for these broader constituencies will be made at two levels. Access for large numbers could be bought by the government from commercial providers, but that would cost a ton 💸, which is pretty unlikely given the Federal budget deficit. Meanwhile, with the current mix of government-supported and commercial providers, the environment for these user classes is actually quite competitive 🏁. People who can pay their own way can usually get on the network from a choice of providers at reasonable cost. Congress can help these groups by making sure the market for network services stays open and competitive. Short of either regulating the industry or setting up a brand-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 goes that route, it has several options to keep prices affordable. It could seek to impose regulations on the network providers through the FCC at a national level, or it could urge the state PUCs to do it at the local level. (Of course, the viability of state PUC regulation becomes questionable because there would almost certainly be little uniformity in how each state's PUC treated a national service. 🙃) Congress could also impose a tariff on network providers' profits and use that tariff to subsidize universal access. Of course, it should understand that these courses of action would raise touchy questions of conflicts between Federal and state jurisdiction. 🚩

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

Unless Congress could build a separate rationale for the needs of each network constituency, from supercomputer users to grade school students, specific goal setting by Congress might imply that Congress was arbitrarily judging some constituencies to be more worthy than others. That would be a tough course to follow, because the people left out would want to know what the basis for such a judgment was. Solid answers would be hard to come by, since networking as enabling educational technology is so new that no one is quite sure how to measure its value yet. Without those assurances, it may be difficult for Congress to justify its spread on any grounds other 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 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're 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're likely to demand action analogous to that. 📣

Motivated by these concerns, Mitch Kapor has been arguing very eloquently for building 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 design a 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, which 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 to only one other area. 🎯

A Corporation for Public Networking? 👑

Network governance and oversight are key policy issues.

If Congress has doubts about the current situation, it might want to consider the creation of an entity for NREN management, development, oversight and subsidization that is more neutral than the NSF. 🧐

Action should be taken to ensure that any such entity is more representative of the full network constituency than the NSF is. If Congress decides to sanction network use by a community broader than the scientific and research elite, it must understand the importance of creating a forum that would bring together the complete range of stakeholders in the national network. 🫶

While such a forum would not have to be a carbon copy of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, given the half billion dollars to be spent on the network over the next five years and the very confused and contentious policy picture, it might make sense to spend perhaps a million dollars a year on the creation of an independent oversight and planning agency for the network. Such an entity could report its findings to the Congress and respond to goals formulated by the Congress. 📝

Congress could declare the development and maintenance of a national public data network infrastructure a matter of national priority. It could make it clear that the government will, as it does in issues of national transportation systems, the national financial system, and national communications systems, maintain an interest in the development and control of a system that serves both the goals of improved education and new technology development. 🌈

To carry out such a mandate, a Corporation for Public Networking (CPN) could have fifteen governors nominated by the members of the network community and subject to the approval of the Congress. 👸

Each governor would represent a network constituency.

  1. The NSF
  2. Department of Energy
  3. National Aeronautics & Space Administration
  4. Advanced Research Projects Agency
  5. Corporate Users
  6. K-12
  7. Higher Education
  8. Public Libraries & State and Local Networks
  9. Commercial Network Information Service Providers
  10. Interexchange Carriers such as AT&T, MCI, Sprint, etc.
  11. The Regional Bell Operating Companies
  12. Personal Computer Users
  13. Computer Manufacturers
  14. Disabled Users
  15. University Computing

Since the legislation calls for backbone nodes in all 50 states, such a structure would be a reasonable way to coordinate Federal support for the network on a truly national basis. One that, by acknowledging the network as a national resource, would give representation to the full breadth of its constituencies. Governors could use the network to sample and help to articulate the national concerns of their respective constituencies. 🗺️

If it adopted these goals, Congress could give a CPN a range of powers:

  1. The CPN could be a forum for the expression of the interests of all NREN constituencies. In the event the network were to be administered by the NSF, it could be a much more accurate sounding board of network user concerns than the FNC or the FNC Advisory Council.
  2. The CPN could be authorized to make recommendations to NSF and other agencies about how funds should be distributed.

Such recommendations could include truly independent assessments of the technical needs of the network community and the most cost effective ways of achieving them. 💖

  1. Okay so option three is giving the CPN the job of handing out the funding itself 💅. Yes, that means more admin costs and more staff, which is a real cost, not gonna lie 😭. BUT here's the glow-up: starting from scratch means it would be free of the vested interests the National Science Foundation has in high-end network solutions 🦋. Congress would likely get a clearer picture of where and how effectively public monies were being spent 👀. With that job, the CPN could also keep extensive pressure on network providers to stay interconnected 🫶. And when Congress is thinking about cost, it should remember that effective oversight of subsidies funneled through NSF would mean hiring extra staff at that agency too 💀.
  2. Congress might want to ask a CPN to take a look at how the $200 million in NREN R&D monies is being used 🔍. Policy direction for spending federal funds is still kinda messy, because the lines are fuzzy between the network as a tool for leveraging technology competitiveness in commercial networking environments and the network as a tool to facilitate science and education 🌀. If Congress decides the major policy direction of the network should be developing it as a tool for science and education, then it may want the monies directed toward ARPA to go to improved databases, user interfaces and user tools like knowbots 🧚, rather than a faster network used by fewer and fewer people 🙈. A CPN that represented the breadth of the network's user constituencies could give better guidance than the FCCSET or ARPA on spending federal subsidies aimed at adding new capabilities to the network ✨.
  3. Additional levels of involvement could have the CPN act as a national quasi-board of networking public utilities 🏛️. It could be given an opportunity to promote low cost access plans developed by commercial providers 💸. If it borrowed some of the fund raising structure of National Public Radio, it should be able to raise very significant funds from grass roots users at the individual and small business level, who are made to feel that they have a stake in its operation 📻💖.
  4. If Congress wanted to increase the CPN's role even further, it could decide that once network commercialization and technology transfer goals are completed, the majority of the NREN funds go to the CPN, which could then put out a bid for a CPN backbone 🌸. In effect, Congress could dictate that the backbone announced by the NSF for implementation in 1993 be implemented and run as a joint project between the NSF and a CPN 🤝.

All entities should be considered eligible to join and use the CPN in support of research and education. Commercial companies who wanted to use the CPN to interact with the academic community should pay a commercial rate to do so 💅.

With the availability of a parallel commercial network, commercial restrictions on the CPN could be very much loosened to include anything in support of research and education 🌈. The CPN would study and report to Congress on how gateways between commercial TCP/IP networks and the CPN network could be maintained 🧩.

  1. Some suggest that Congress go even further 👑. These people emphasize that a replacement for the R&D aspects of the Internet, in the context of commercialization and privatization, is uncertain 🤔. Bell Labs and Bellcore remain as the research arms of the Public Switched Telephone Network. However, neither of them has ever developed major strengths in wide area data networking. Nor do they appear to be likely to do so in the near future 😬. Despite this situation, the major private investment made in the Gigabit Testbeds indicates that the american telecommunications industry feels a need to invest in continued research 🔥. This is something that the current commercial players are too small to do. Furthermore, it is something that the larger players, driven by pressure to report quarterly profits, may find difficult to do 📉.

Congress could make a decision that Federal investment in the technology should emphasize less pump-priming to increase the pace of what most see as inevitable commercialization, and more the continued building of new networking technology for both technology transfer and support of the technology as an enabling tool 🛠️. In this case, Congress could direct the CPN to plan, deploy and manage a state of the art public information infrastructure. With goals for constituencies and levels of service defined, the CPN could produce for Congress multiple scenarios for developing and maintaining two networks 🗺️.

The first would be an experimental network where the very newest technologies could be explored. It could be very similar to the current gigabit testbeds, but this time with all five projects linked together. The second would be a state-of-the-art operational network that can provide wide spread field trials of technology developed on the experimental network. With the maturation of the technology on the operational network, it would be available for open transfer to commercial service. It should be remembered that such a continuous, widespread network R&D environment would provide wide spread training experience for graduate students that would otherwise be unavailable 🎓.

Initial seed money would come from public funds. However, the bulk of support could come from a percentage of profits (as cash or in kind contributions) that participating companies would be required to contribute to the CPN as the price of admission for developing and benefiting from new technology 💰. Care should be taken in structuring contributions in a way that small start-up firms would not be locked out. To ensure this, Congress could mandate that the CPN commissioners (perhaps with appropriate oversight from the National Academy of Sciences, the IEEE, or the ACM) develop a plan to ensure that the cost of entry to such a testbed does not exceed the capitalization of the current small commercial players 🌱.

It could also require the development of proposals to handle the issues of interconnection billing, billing for actual use versus size of connection, and interoperability among network providers 🧾.

A different financing model could be explored if the CPN were instructed to report on the feasibility of selling shares to commercial carriers in a national networking testbed and R&E network, where carriers could, over a long term basis, develop and mature new networking technologies before transferring them to the commercial marketplace 📈.

  1. In its November 1, 1991 recommendations to the National Science Foundation, FARNET suggested that the NSF should consider the issuance of several separate solicitations for the development of software tools for end-user applications and network management and operations 📣. To emphasize its point, it added: "we believe that the lack of useful tools for information retrieval and display is one of the biggest impediments to the productive use of the network and has impaired the credibility of the NREN in the eyes of the target user populations." FARNET admonished the NSF to emphasize open architectures and standards in its solicitations, adding that "where standards are not adequately understood or developed, the NSF should support programs to test, evaluate and improve them."

FARNET concluded by recommending "that the NSF, working with the user community and the providers, define and implement clear criteria for the award of additional funding to mid-level and campus networks . . . The new criteria should be designed to further . . . goals such as the extension of network services to new or underserved communities (for ubiquity); the improvement of network operations, procedures and tools (for reliability); the enhancement of existing services through development activities, upgrading of existing connections to 'have not' institutions; leveraging of state, local, and private funds (to maximize the impact of Federal investment), and training and support for end-users (in cooperation with national and local programs)."

If a CPN is created, it should be directly involved with working toward these important goals. If implementation of the network is left to the National Science Foundation, Congress should emphasize the importance of the NSF's meeting these goals 🎯.

  1. Finally, a strong and broad-based CPN might be able to make recommendations to Congress on the identification and resolution of problems of telecommunications policy engendered by the continued growth of this network technology 🌟. It could perhaps play an educational role in advising state Public Utilities Commissions on the long term implications of their decisions 🎀.

Summary ✨

okay bestie, policy makers have to decide soon whether the National Research and Education Network is a public good or a private good 😭. privatization is already moving fast since the network backbone is getting rebid, but there's still time for some careful planning for how this thing grows. within 10 to 20 years it could be an extraordinarily powerful system, as everywhere as the current telephone network, giving all Americans access to information the way public libraries were set up for a similar purpose about a century ago 📚🦋

Congress needs to get that the NREN isn't just a new technology (honestly a lot of it is old tech 💅). it has the potential to become the most powerful means of access to information ever created. with that in mind, Congress has to decide who the NREN will serve, and who gets to have access to it 🎀

once that's settled, the other choices fall into four big areas:

  • First: Congress has to decide how much oversight the network needs. that could range from making the FCC regulate the network, to tight reviews of the NSF's actions, to handing oversight powers to a Corporation for Public Networking 👑
  • Second: it has to decide whether the best place to subsidize technology transfer is inside a privatized operational NREN or inside the experimental gigabit testbeds. without a better understanding of how the technologies are evolving in the commercial market, and how both the testbeds and the NREN are evolving, it'll be hard to make a wise call. and this choice will also be shaped by its decision about who the network is meant to serve 🧚
  • Third: it has to decide whether to subsidize a backbone for an NREN. if it does, it also has to decide whether that backbone gets built as a private network or as part of the PSTN 🌸
  • Fourth: it has to decide whether to subsidize more connectivity, broader use inside institutions that are already connected, or both. in other words: should more institutions get connected, or should the network be easier to use for the people in the institutions already on it? 🍓

if Congress goes with options three and four, it's going to want to look into the Corporation for Public Networking scenario we went over above 💜

Access to information is access to power 🔥. building a National Research and Education Network on the NSFnet and the rest of the American Internet means building a national information access system with unprecedented power. in terms of how it affects Americans' lives and well-being, the NREN, if it's designed properly, will be just as significant as the national Interstate highway system and the national electric power grid. the national highway, the national power grid, or the national telephone system could all serve as models for how to build it. the Federal Government provides a public but otherwise unregulated Interstate highway system with universal access open to all Americans. private industry provides our electric power, but it was only allowed to do that in exchange for following Federal and state regulation meant to make sure every citizen can get affordable access. the national telephone system was set up under a similar "social contract" 🤝. if the nation doesn't want to be dangerously split into information rich and information poor classes, policy makers have about five years to pick between a Federally provided National network or a privately provided but nationally regulated network ⏳

during the development and maturation of the national network, policy makers should also keep a very close eye on its impact on the public switched telephone network (PSTN). the technology, and how fast it's changing, will only make the potentially serious impact bigger. that impact comes from unregulated parts of the telecom industry being free to chase market solutions that keep regulated companies from staying viable players 😤. we need to realize we're about to enter a power struggle over the control of 21st century information resources. it promises to be every bit as harsh and bruising as the fight over natural resources at the end of the last century 💀

while most people have good intentions, as this study has shown, the playing field is a total mess 🙈. gigabit technology (if we understand it properly) is actually desirable! still, we have to be super careful that its cost doesn't make low bandwidth or "low end" entry into the network more expensive 🫶

not having a specific definition of the communities to be served, no plan that everyone agrees on for serving them, and not enough money to serve everyone have all added up to this chaotic situation. a lot of the players are mainly motivated by wanting a bigger institutional role so they can grab larger Federal allocations of funds 😒

without a well-thought-out plan that everyone signs off on, plus adequate money, the big push to speed up and widen the technology could ironically end up weakening the whole foundation of the network 😬. until Congress gives more direction, the squabbling is probably going to keep going. without that direction, at best a lot of public money gets spent ineffectively, and at worst it looks like empire building. that would make any Federal support for research or educational networking pretty unlikely 🥺

we really need to avoid that, because a well-designed, well-developed network could do so much good in both policy arenas 🌈. unfortunately, the NSF is under mounting criticism, ANS is on the defensive and rumored to be financially weakened, and Congressional hearings are scheduled for mid-March. so the chance of a destructive free-for-all is really, really high 😭

Security Considerations 🔒

okay bestie, this part is very serious and I need you to hear it: Security issues are not discussed in this memo. 😱 there's nothing about security in here at all, so the security story isn't covered by this document 💀

Author's Address 💌

Gordon Cook is the editor and publisher behind the COOK Report on Internet. here's how to reach him:

Gordon Cook, Editor and Publisher
COOK Report on Internet
431 Greenway Ave
Ewing, NJ 08618

Phone: (609) 882-2572
EMail: cook@path.net

and that's a wrap on the whole doc, bestie!! 🌈🎀💖

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