Realizing the Information Future The Internet and Beyond (1994) / Chapter Skim
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Summary and Recommendations
Summary and Recommendations
Pages 1-16
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The potential benefits can be glimpsed in the experiences to date of the research and education communities, where access through the Internet to high-speed networks has begun to radically change the way researchers work, educators teach, and students learn. To a large extent, the NII will be a transformation and extension of today's computing and communications infrastructure (including, for example, the Internet, telephone, cable, cellular, data, and broadcast networks)
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COMMITTEE AND ITS TASKS To help meet the challenge of building an NII with lasting value and utility, the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board assembled a committee to study issues raised by the shift to a larger, more truly national networking capability. The committee that authored the report brings unique competence derived from members who developed and pioneered the use of the Internet from within the research and education communities and who have researched, built, financed, and operated networks generally.
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The committee's vision of the NII gives form to these diverse expectations as a data network with open and evolvable interfaces. Such a network should be capable of carrying information services of all kinds, from suppliers of all kinds, to customers of all kinds, across network service providers of all kinds, in a seamless accessible fashion.
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DEVELOPING AN OPEN DATA NETWORK ARCHITECTURE Constructing an Open Data Network translates into a number of technical goals and considerations for planning the NII: there is a need for a certain minimum level of physical infrastructure to be provided; for a minimum set of services to be made available; for NII compliance to be defined, to ensure provision of the basic services and to illuminate what is and is not compatible with the open architecture; for supporting standards to be set; for security provisions to be developed; and for oversight and management. Configuring the Components Achieving an open network hinges on articulating and maintaining an appropriate architecture.
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Such an arrangement reinforces the principle of separation and is intended not to prevent the same supplier from acting in two roles, but rather to ensure that individual competitors can enter into the marketplace at either level. The minimum set of higher-level application services, which builds on the bearer, transport, and middleware services, includes electronic mail, fax, remote login, database browsing, digital object storage, and financial transaction services.
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Among them are competing approaches the development of a unilateral standard by a dominant vendor versus development in an open, multiparty environment—and the tension between the simple, short-term solution and the longer-term, general and flexible solution. Although in the context of the computer industry standards have evolved through vendors implementing unilateral standards as well as marketplace adoption of ad hoc standards, neither approach necessarily supports development of the standards needed for a sufficiently general and flexible ODN architecture of the scope required for an NII.
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While those efforts address meeting the broadest possible set of needs, the research and education communities present specific sets of needs that should also be recogrLized and addressed as part of NII planning and policymaking. Financial considerations dominate those concerns, since the research and education communities depend primarily on public funding and generally have very tight budgets.
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Financial burdens are not homogeneous across research and education users, although there has been little systematic analysis of the variation. Researchers with extraordinary demand for network bandwidth are among those who raise questions about the prospect of user charges, and the expected increase in video and audio applications suggests that pricing as a mechanism for rationing access to infrastructure will become more generally needed over time.
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Given the government's fundamental interest in the missions of the research, education, and associated library communities, support for information infrastructure access and use is consistent with the overall provision of funding for these communities. However, the allocation of support for information infrastructure calls for a weighing and balancing of competing investment alternatives relating to research and education (e.g., for different kinds of inputs to the processes of research and education)
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Long-term Strategy, Management, and Wise Investment In promoting the NII, the administration has taken a number of steps that demonstrate the impact that leadership and vision can have. At the same time, sustaining that leadership and establishing the mechanisms needed to implement the vision require additional actions aimed at ensuring both the development of an architecture for an Open Data Network and the deployment of an infrastructure built from that architecture.
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As part of that balancing, it will be important that NSF and other agencies not back away from the research and education communities in terms of commitment to their needs for and contributions to information infrastructure. Despite limited resources for actually building information infrastructure, the federal government has several mechanisms for influencing its shape, in terms of both architecture and deployment.
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To maintain this position, the federal government should continue to make funding for research in support of information infrastructure a priority. RECOMMENDATIONS The Vision of an Open Data Network The committee believes that the appropriate future communications infrastructurefor the nation will come into existence only if its development is guided by a continuing and overarching vision of its purpose and architecture.
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The technical roots associated with the National Research and Education Network program and other components of the larger High Performance Computing and Communications initiative must be effectively and consistently factored into that vision. The committee recommends that thefederal government expand its NII agenda to embrace the Open Data Network (ODN)
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RECOMMENDATION 2: Technology Deployment The committee recommends that the government work with the relevant industries, in particular the cable and telephone companies, to find suitable economic incentives so that the access circuits Connections to homes, schools, and an nn ) that ~~'i11 he reranstructed nver the coming decade are engineered in ways ~ , ~ · ~ _ _ O that support the Open Data Network architecture.
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RECOMMENDATION 5: Network Research The committee recommends that the National Science Foundation, along with the Advanced Research Projects Agency, other Department of Defense research agencies, the Department of Energy, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, continue and, in fact, expand a program of research in networks, with attention to emerging issues at the higher levels of an Open Data Network architecture (e.g., applications and information management) , in addition to research at the lower levels of the architecture.
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