The "vision" thing in networking was quite a problem just a few short
years ago. It used to be rather difficult to explain to our families,
colleagues, and bosses why we were so excited about networking, let
alone to convey the relevance of networking to their particular
interests and concerns. The widespread publicity about the success of
the Internet and the promise of the Clinton Administration's National
Information Infrastructure (NII) initiative have eliminated that
difficulty forever.
Now people not only in the research and education community but
throughout society at large are turning to networking, hoping to
increase the efficiency of their operations, to improve the
effectiveness of their products and services, to revitalize the missions
and strategies of their enterprises, and--let us never forget--to have a
good time. We no longer need to evangelize networking to the degree we
once did. But we do need to start "ecumenizing" the cultural values of
the many separate communities that are now populating the Internet.
Each distinct Internet community expects something different from
networking, and most communities try to get that thing as fast as they
possibly can--and without spending much time thinking about the
interests and objectives of other communities. For instance, most of us
who have been on the Internet for, say, five years or more got into
networking in search of a new way to improve the productivity of our
research and educational activities; we hoped that the Internet would
help to increase the benefits while decreasing the costs of those
activities, and we expect more of the same from the NII.
Other communities that have come onto the Internet more recently are
drawn to networking in order to stimulate economic development, to make
government more accessible and accountable to its citizens, to promote
community and individual development, or to revolutionize entertainment
and retail services, to mention just a few of the most frequently cited
reasons. The Internet serves that very wide range of objectives by
offering to quite different sorts of people (from numerous backgrounds
and at various levels of preparation) access to a common infrastructure
of tools, capabilities, resources, and services. In the complicated,
multipurpose environment that the Internet recently has become, however,
it's easy for one person's opportunity seized to be viewed by another
person as simply the nuisance du jour. And some folks are responding to
their perceived nuisances in dismissive and destructive ways.
Thus, the "values thing" has replaced the "vision thing" as the
most frequently voiced worry among long-term networking enthusiasts and
Internet mavens. The main event in this new arena is the steadily
escalating clash between people who are motivated mostly by the creation
of public goods and those who are motivated mostly by the generation of
private gains. Framing and addressing this clash is a key issue, perhaps
even the key issue, influencing the evolution of the Internet user
community in the immediate future.
One reason is that by this time next year, the highest single
concentration of hosts reachable via the Internet will most certainly be
in U.S. commercial organizations rather than in U.S. educational
institutions. As of the "Internet Walk" of August 1994, U.S. educational
institutions accounted for the highest concentration (27 percent) of
hosts reachable via the Internet, but hosts in commercial organizations
were running a close second (24 percent) and were growing at a much
faster rate.
A second reason is that long before this time next year, the backbone of
the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), which has served the
U.S. portion of the Internet so admirably since the mid-1980s, will be
decommissioned in favor of a new national Internet architecture whose
two most visible features will be privately owned and operated "network
access points" interconnected by equally privately owned and operated
"network service providers."
We are not going to wake up one morning to find that the clash between
commercial and noncommercial Internet users has resolved itself to
everyone's satisfaction. We also should not give in to the facile, but
negative, assumption that the noncommercial values that have dominated
the Internet will soon be replaced by equally dominant commercial ones.
Each of us needs to take personal responsibility for the Internet
cultural values that matter most to us and our use of the Internet. We
need to be not only tolerant of the values espoused by others but also
vigilant in the defense of our individual values when they are
challenged by the specific behaviors of others.
We also need to let our actions speak for our values louder than our
words speak. For example, we can pursue strategies that promote such
long-standing Internet practices as collaborative development of
capabilities, resources, and services; direct participation in decisions
by parties who are materially affected by those decisions; and respect
for the possibility that innovative breakthroughs will occur in
unexpected places.
Finally, we have to become expert at pursuing such strategies in a
progressively more market-based environment in which capitalization,
competition, and returns on investments will be increasingly important
creators of new Internet opportunities and challenges.
Paul Evan Peters is executive director of the Coalition for Networked
Information. [email protected].