numerous and are well covered elsewhere in this volume; they include such basic public policy concerns as how to encourage the rapid deployment of the infrastructure on a broad basis, how ubiquitous the new infrastructure must be, and regulatory issues related to competition and monopoly.

The second component of the NII initiative is the set of applications that will be enabled by this upgraded telecommunications infrastructure. These applications must drive and justify the initiative: the new applications will engage and excite the public to support the effort. Indeed, the initiative has been justified with visions of a citizenry informed and empowered by greatly improved access to information and students—be they children in rural areas or adults engaged in lifelong learning activities—exploiting ubiquitous access to the world's literature to facilitate their learning. These visions have been eloquently sketched not only by the research and education community but also by political leaders such as Vice President Gore. They are indeed worthy goals for public policy, and, technically, the visions are challenging but not unrealistic. From social, legal, political, and economic perspectives, however, they are much more problematic. The difficulties are not widely understood and have not been well addressed.

Curiously, services such as person-to-person electronic mail—which are quite similar to the services offered by voice telephony, and for which we do have some understanding of demand, usage, and economic basis—are not often cited as justifications for moving forward with development of the NII, either by analogy to current phone service as a universal citizen right or as an example of a clearly viable commercial service that could be enabled by a ubiquitous NII. Perhaps they are not enough: not sufficiently compelling in their impact, not exciting enough as a potential marketplace, not challenging enough in terms of the base telecommunications technology necessary to support them.

The new telecommunications infrastructure will enable other information-content-intensive applications that may create entire new business sectors. These are more compelling to the corporate world and are not often mentioned as public policy justifications—in particular, the creation of a marketing paradise on a previously unimagined scale. Such enterprises will succeed or fail based primarily on the marketplace; their success or failure is not a public policy issue. My opinion, which is somewhat at odds with the view represented by the enormous investments currently being made in the alliances and acquisitions involving regional Bell operating companies, media companies, and cable television companies, is that the marketplace viability of many of these commercial services (and the time frame in which they will become profitable) is still uncertain.

In framing access to information services and resources through the NII as a public policy issue, we are fundamentally in conflict about what we are trying to accomplish. We welcome the economic growth that sales of information access through the new networks are likely to represent. For those who can pay, it seems clear that the NII can only increase the range of information that is accessible for purchase, since it will add to all of the current sources of information, and the NII forms a hospitable environment for a wide range of fundamentally new types of information content and information services.

But as a society we have beliefs about the rights of citizens to have access to a wide range of information and the importance of such access in contexts like education. The NII is particularly appealing because it offers a technological environment that can expand such public access to information to support the visions of greatly improved education discussed earlier and can facilitate equal access to knowledge by citizens in rural as well as urban areas. In today's world we welcome and support the diversity represented by libraries, bookstores, broadcast television and radio, and printed newspapers and magazines sold both at newsstands and by subscription. While all of these enterprises compete with each other to a limited extent, they have come to coexist fairly comfortably (though with continuing minor conflicts around the boundaries). In a new world of widespread distribution of electronic information through networks (under business terms we can only guess at today), it is unclear that all these institutions will continue to maintain independent existences. They

FRONT MATTER (R1-R10)

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW (1-20)

PART 1--SETTING THE STAGE (21-104)

PART 2--REGULATION AND THE EMERGING TELECOMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE (105-172)

PART 3--PUBLIC INVESTMENT IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE (173-226)

APPENDIX: CONTRIBUTORS AND PARTICIPANTS (227-230)