 Welcome. Welcome to the 12th Sunnergy Broadcast, the worldwide broadcast coming to you today from Comnet in Washington, D.C. We're going as usual by satellite to North America, to South America, to all of Europe and to all of Africa. All of our guests in Moscow, Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, welcome. During this program, we expect to hear from you coming in by telephone or coming by electronic mail or coming by facsimile to ask questions of our panel. Today, we're going to devote the broadcast to a discussion of the global information infrastructure. Now, the way we work for those not familiar with Sunnergy, everything we say comes to you on this television broadcast in the closed caption to channel. That means it's ASCII in the video, which means it arrives at your site and goes on to your computers or your tape and stays there. So this is an indexable, searchable television broadcast worldwide, which will remain. Those that wish to have more information and read the reading lists, follow any of the suggestions of our guests, will find those suggestions on the worldwide web pages. We'll give you all those locations during the show, the URLs, the location for all of these references, so you can follow as much as you would like the detail of what we will discuss in a relatively short television broadcast. Now, let me show you what we're going to talk about today. And to do that, I have a small camera to my right, and I'll draw for you the entire global information infrastructure. Let me make this straight here. Now, the first and often most talked about part is the part in the middle, this large cloud, this circle. And you see the words written in this circle, wireless, fiber, ATM, gigabit networks, and the players, the cable companies, the PTTs, the telcos, direct broadcast satellite. This part is what ComNet, what most of the major networking and communication shows deal with. This part we'll touch upon because the issues here are who pays for this, how does this work, who has access. But that's not the focus of today's conversation. The second part of the global information infrastructure here on my chart are the people that create things. It's people, not technology, so I'll slide it over. That's this part over here. This is the Rolling Stones and Peter Gabriel in the National Gallery of Art. This is the realm of intellectual property, copyright questions, security and authenticity in transmission. We won't talk much about that either, but these are the creators of all those things we enjoy to read and see. What we're going to talk about today, and in three separate segments, I'll put over here, this is all of us. Those of us that read, those of us that listen, those of us that watch television, those of us that have access to libraries. These are people, all of us here at home, in schools, scattered throughout wherever we work, reaching across this cloud in the middle to those things that are created and that are of interest to us. This is the territory we're going to talk about today. Questions of access. How do we all reach this information? Questions of who pays for it? We do, but how? Questions of who's in charge here? That's the focal point we're going to take today. We're going to use an illustration of this. We're going to use a special group, because only when you look at the special groups do you find the questions that must be answered. Only when you look at the desires by scientists or those doing computational fluid dynamics to build airplanes and missiles, those needs led to the ARPANET, because you can exchange data very rapidly worldwide. Those questions for us today will be asked by children, children in schools, children with special interests and needs, which will drive the evolution of the global information infrastructure. Now let me introduce who we have here today to answer these questions. To my immediate right, we have Bob Kahn. Those of you in the network world know that Bob Kahn is one of the principal founders of the Internet. By devising the protocols, building the very first Internet node, putting together the elements of the infrastructure for all that we now know as Internet. Today he's president of the Corporation for the National Research Initiative, focusing on deployment of gigabit testbed structures, deployment of intelligent agents or knowledge robots. How do these work? Focusing on taking the questions of intellectual property and copyright and transforming them into this domain called the Global Information Internet Infrastructure. And beyond this, Bob is probably the only person that could have done this. Bob formed an organization by calling together all high technology industries first in the U.S. and now globally to take the technical group, the executive vice presidents of technology of all the phone companies, all the computer companies, all the information providers, and formed a group called the Cross Industry Working Team. A quiet technical group that attempts to establish for banks any work what is needed in the infrastructure. So I'll ask Bob to discuss Cross Industry Working Team and CNRI in a bit. Bob Kahn. Next to Bob, Mike Nelson. Michael Nelson wrote the High Performance Computing Act as a staff member for Senator Al Gore and now in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael is responsible for the United States White House for information policy. What direction do we as a nation take? Next to him, Wendell Bailey, the vice president of the National Cable Television Association. The group that's put more bandwidth into the ground torn up more rose gardens doing so. And led us to these issues of who reaches the homes, how many rose bush, how many trenches are placed in your front yard to reach your home and how does it all work? And next to Wendell is Eric Schmidt, the vice president, chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems who began his career by writing network code so that everyone could have access to things. Beyond Eric sitting at the machine is Carl Malamoud, who's the president of Internet Multicasting. He's the one person who has now created a new radio station, television station, live feeds from the floor of the United States Senate, from the floor of the United States House of Representatives. By utilizing modern telecommunications, he's become a one person c-span, a provider of public access to governmental information. And he will be riding on the net looking up your e-mail questions for us, retrieving pages that are interesting as the conversation moves forward from sites worldwide that are on the Internet. Now, you can also call, and I'll show you the numbers on the screen, phone numbers for those of you around the world that would like to ask any of our panelists questions, e-mail addresses. We'll put those addresses up on the screen in a moment. Those of you in the audience here at ComNet may go to a microphone in the, to my right in the back of the auditorium and ask questions. We will tell you as we proceed when it would be polite to do that. Don't wait, just do it. So with that, let me take you to the first of a video of children that brings to the, brings us questions about why are we doing all the work we do? Why are we here to discuss global information infrastructures? The community of East Palo Alto, California, is in a process of transition. In 1985, the school district was 85% black. Today, the statistics are 27% black, 2% white, with the remainder Hispanic and Asian. 70% of the children are in a language minority. Against enormous odds, Ravenswood School District has emerged as a technology leader. If I had to depend on the base revenues from the state of California, we would have one computer in this lab as opposed to the ones that we have. Denise Maiden, then a full-time secretary at Ravenswood, researched the options and began to solicit corporate support. When I got to the district, the first thing I noticed is that secretaries had PCs, but none was communicating with each other. Denise convinced the board that networking technology was needed and a plan was eventually approved. With help from local firms, the district connected all eight schools to a wide area network and established three computer labs. What I'm trying to do is to use technology to assist me in helping language minority youngsters acquire language earlier. Our goal is to be sure that they take full advantage and that the electronic superhighway not bypassing in a city like normally the highways are doing in many areas. A little over an hour down the road, the Hollister California schools have not benefited from a close proximity to Silicon Valley as Ravenswood has. The area is in transition from an agricultural community to a commuter bedroom. The district's technology future is being debated. We're already on the information footpath. As a matter of fact it might be information bushwhacking, but I don't think we're going to be bypassed. It's pretty clear that more and more people are moving to this community who have connections to well to the information industry and they won't tolerate a school system that doesn't prepare the children for the jobs of the future. For our system to stay abreast of what's going on, we need to have some sort of focus and set some sort of goals for technology and as far as I know that is not in place. I see us as being behind. While growth may bring higher expectations eventually, in the short term it creates burdens. When you're growing you're scrambling all the time to come up with enough classrooms just to house children. So numbers is a big issue. Support is a large issue. Materials is another incredible large issue. Without the financial resources necessary to solve problems the information highway may just be the fast lane beyond the capabilities of administrators, teachers and students. How do we ensure that schools like Hollisters are not left behind? There's the question I think that we can expand. How do we take a territory as we saw that has a house, lots of land in another house and cable parlance, something that has very few connections per mile of cable? Costs a lot of money to connect. How do we take some area that at the moment does not seem likely to have immediate access to the information on the network? How do we bring them into this family or community? I wanted to start with Bob Kahn because for 25 years he has worked constantly in this evolution because it's never a fixed process. You've attempted for 25 years to bring the internet to as many people as possible and now you've succeeded beyond your wildest expectations with 30 million people or some number like this out connecting with kids in Ravenswood elementary school that are in one of the poorest sections of East Palo Alto and suddenly they're full bore internet citizens. The process to get there means you have to marshal all of the technical resources of the computer companies the telephone companies. What mechanism are we going to rely upon to continue this development? How do you see this evolving? Well if you look at the historical evolution of it, the internet started as a research activity of the US government and for a long time it was really developing the fundamentals of the groundwork. There are still a lot of people who have this impression that the internet today is heavily funded by the US government or predominantly funded or that there's some central party in charge and in fact the architecture of the internet is such that virtually anybody can become a part of it and use it if they abide by the interfacing protocols and the like it's sort of out there in the public domain for anybody to use. Today the predominant investment is by the private sector. It's commercial companies that are providing access to companies that are providing services. The research community is still an integral part of it but it seems to me that the issue of how you expand the usage is going to be based on some kind of pay as you go strategy that allows that to happen and that can be done in many different ways. I don't think there's any one party that's going to decide it for the country nor do I think there should be any one party that decides it for the US anyway. When it comes to how schools get access that could be done in many different ways. It could be done through the local tax base as many other things in the school systems are. It could be done through some kind of governmental regulatory process that enables people to make contributions to the schools in ways that they are perhaps now not able to do. It could be done through contributions. It could be done through government grants. It could be done through a whole variety of mechanisms and I think there's not going to be one solution for the country but rather many alternatives. The real question is what is the value of the internet and the related computing technologies in the school system. To me it's got great potential value but I think the schools have to find that out for themselves and then the solutions will fall into place. So the demand when the people in that agricultural community in Hollister who have other competing demands for money. Books for the children art supplies just more rooms for the children as they have more children moving into their area. They have to balance the benefits from being on the internet against the other needs for that money. But that's a kind of choice that's no different than the educational system and many other systems have to decide today. If you look at the level of educational support across the United States it's not uniform. Various states make different decisions about what they want to put into the educational system, what quality they're willing to afford and how they deal with those investments as a function of the economic climate within the country. I think you're going to see the same thing here. It's just that it's a new entry into the scene. It's like a new kind of educational opportunity that's been provided and they're going to have to digest that and I think real experience is going to be a big help. So the more that we can bootstrap this process by getting experimental capabilities in place, test beds in place, the more that industry can help, the more that government can help, the quicker that school environment is likely to understand why it should develop in that direction. Now Michael at the White House, the policies that you've put in place and the iteration by Vice President Gore and by yourself about how we must move forward in a networked way to bring everyone into the internet Bob just described, this question of how we pay for it or how people make choices about where they spend their money, you've attempted to or you have in fact put programs in place that give some support to those experimenting. What do you think in advice for those that are in Russia or in China or in Brussels or around the world, what policies of other governments would let them move forward? You see the same problems worldwide as in the United States? Well we really do and I think there are two questions, there's a very important question of who pays for it and the answer in most cases will be private citizens, users of this new network. So then the better question and actually the more difficult one is how can we make it cost as little as possible. Three answers to that, first of all is competition in the marketplace and we think that is fundamental and we're urging other countries to adopt policies like the ones that we're adopting here that will enable full competition in this marketplace. Today still in the United States there are states where it is illegal to compete with a local phone company. The technologies that the cable industry has enable them to provide phone service in many cases and yet legally they're prohibited from doing that. In other countries it's far worse, there's a monopoly phone company, that's the only player in the marketplace they charge what they can get. We think competition is the key to bringing down prices, improving service quality, improving the choice for all consumers around the world, so we're promoting that kind of approach. Second fundamental is technology and we believe that the federal government working with industry can help develop new technologies that will make high speed internet connections much more affordable and much easier to get in every part of this country, whether it's a small rural community, whether it's an inner city neighborhood new technologies, new approaches can provide better service. And then last we believe there is a place for regulation in some cases as a last measure to ensure that prices are not exorbitant, to ensure that there is universal service that everyone can get access to these high speed systems. Today, thanks to regulation, 93% of all Americans have phones in their home. They can afford it because we've developed a system that provides some money for those people in rural areas who couldn't otherwise afford phone service. We do that because we all benefit from having a universal network. So those are our three approaches, competition, technology, and as a last resort regulation. Now you don't want to make Wendell a criminal although at the moment the cable operators could well be criminals for providing a movement of bits that happen not to be a video but instead our voice, a phone call. In some countries they're doing that. In the United Kingdom for instance the cable industry is aggressively going after the phone business and they're competing head to head with the British telecom. They could do the same thing in this country and provide much lower prices, much more many new services I think. Well to do that though, there you are speaking to you as you are the entire cable industry, faced in each state with a separate regulatory entity and with regulatory entities in Washington with overlapping jurisdictions, fights about who's in charge here. How do the members of the cable industry move forward to what seems technically absolutely inevitable moving everything across the wires that you have making you the phone company? It's a fair question and certainly all this debate about the new world of information and the infrastructure most people seem to agree that more bandwidth is better than less bandwidth and by that yardstick America is well served with capability already. It's there and what we find is while the federal government has a set of rules and regulations that cable works under, there are also many regulations at the state level and the local level and as Michael said most states have rules that quite simply either forbid or are so tough to deal with that only one provider of telephony service is allowable. We fought very hard in the last Congress, fought in the sense that we encouraged the passage of a major rewrite of the telecommunications law of 1934 that would have in fact imposed a federal rule on states that spoke to the issue of open competition for all of these services and the debate in the Congress and indeed which the administration participated in was really only about the terms and conditions. The ideal was still the ideal that we all shared which is let's get rid of the regulations and the patchwork of regulations at the state level so that those cable operators who feel that their networks can be evolved into a competitive provider of any service can do that because the marketplace demands it, their sensibilities demand it, their morality and the community demand it but are not because anyone makes them or more importantly anyone prevents them from providing these things. If I can add a point, our goal is very simple here. We would like to see a communication sector that was as lightly regulated and as competitive and as innovative as the computer industry. In the computer industry we're seeing dramatic decreases in price performance every 18 months. You can buy twice as much computer for the same price that hasn't been happening in telecommunications partly because there hasn't been the free and open competition that we're trying to encourage. That's the goal I think we can get there and we can do that by realizing that the world's different. We have cable companies that can provide phone service, phone companies can provide cable service, we have wireless technology coming in. We don't have these different industries anymore although we still have regulations that treat them as if they are different. We don't have different sectors. We have industries that are all in the bit business. They're delivering digital services and that's the way they should be regulated not as different sectors that somehow can't compete with each other. Well and in merging as telecommunications and computing merge as computing power substitutes for bandwidth as you begin to get smarter and smarter devices in the homes, the offices in front of us all. Eric you're growing older very rapidly. If you're doubling in speed every 18 months means everything you know is wrong at least every 18 months. When the computer industry attempts to merge and meet with the telephone industry and the cable industry and use common terms there was a phrase someone used earlier, universal access. There are phrases that mean a lot to telephone people but don't mean very much. You have different meanings outside the normal communications environment. How do you see this evolution as we merge the devices at the user's end with the end of this large network? Well the industries have become codependent and yet they each grow out of completely different businesses, educational systems and value systems. One was highly regulated. One was unregulated. One is full of entrepreneurs. One had to deal with the legislative process but both are now crucially dependent on each other because of the rise of digital computing. The fact of the matter is that telecommunications is improving at a price performance perspective at least as good, at least as well as the computer revolution. Bandwidth should be dropping in price at least a factor of two every 18 months but you often don't see that in your country either in the United States or even worse in other countries because it's not being passed to the customer so I completely agree with Mike's point. In fact the US is one of the leading countries in this area. The reason that this will continue is because the digital revolution is all around microprocessors. It's all around Moore's law. It's all around the learning curve. There's no foreseeable end to this rate of improvement. None of us really know what's going to happen when you have an all digital world where all of the media and the transmission are available to you where they can be morphed, analyzed and ultimately empower you to do new things. I believe that the information age is driven by the computer revolution and the decentralization of networking as again pioneered by Bob Kahn and his team will drive restructuring in governments, restructuring of society and restructuring of business because it's empowering and that's the ultimate effect of the collision between these two massive organizations, telecommunications and computing. Now that we've insulted the European PTTs and mentioned of course that their prices are ten times what US prices, we have a phone call from the Netherlands that wants to say something about this. Would you identify yourself please and tell me what organization you're with and where you are? Hi, I'm Martin van Steenberg from Sun Microsystems in Holland. Maybe it's somewhat early in your discussion but we were wondering what kind of dangers are ahead if some companies would monopolize the net as a large maybe also known as the Berlusconi effect. I hope you will address this in your discussions as well because you strive for competition, open competition and innovative development of the net. I think the immediate answer is everyone becomes Prime Minister for a day. Bob you deal with this. Well I guess one of the critical issues is that one has to think about as this whole field evolves, what is product and what is infrastructure in the future. I think it's becoming less clear which is which anymore because of the pervasive flow of software into all parts of the system. Historically it was the case that infrastructure was something that was heavily depreciated at least here over very long periods of time therefore difficult to change not only for financial reasons but physical reasons as well whereas industries like the computer industry when they had their start could be much more dynamic because not everybody was dependent on everything in the infrastructure to build upon. I think we've seen in the internet a movement toward relaxation of some of those linkages where there are parts of the internet for example that can now evolve independent of other parts and there are parts that are fairly constant and fixed they tend to be more at the framework level standards and protocols and things like that. As we get into issues like the ones that were raised just a few minutes ago as to how we make that whole infrastructural area more dynamic I think we need to really rethink what it means to have an infrastructure evolve on a time frame that's different from what we historically think of as commensurate with infrastructure and I think we're at the verge of having some new ideas about how that might actually be carried out particularly driven by the existence of computing in the infrastructure itself the ability to run multiple protocols in parallel the ability to let various groups try things out and I think it's one of the more exciting areas. The dangers hard to predict really I know people have focused on some of them but I suspect this is in many ways virgin territory and we're going to have to come to grips with all kinds of new issues and phenomena that I think most people today probably can't even predict. Now where will people find out answers to this? Carl's been browsing the net at the CNRI homepage the web page are there references to sites where there's information about this or the XIWT the cross industry are there working papers that are accessible to people? Well people have started to write about these issues I don't think you find I don't think I can cite for you any specific place to go and look for the answers I just think this is a topic that's going to get increased attention and particularly as we look to get more dynamism into the infrastructure I think we're going to be looking at more marketplace options that make sense for allowing the infrastructures to evolve more rapidly I cannot point you to a specific place to look today to find those answers Let me just ask Wendell because the cable industry went out and put billions into the ground and into phone poles to bring connectivity to people was it just crazy entrepreneurial optimism or is there a payback here? Sure there's a payback and you might say it was crazy entrepreneurial optimism of course we think that that optimism and that creativity of our members is really what has caused the broadband wiring of this country but you know in answer to the question of the gentleman from the Netherlands I think it's unlikely that there's going to be monopoly over these networks for the simple reason that there are we talk about the seven R box the seven big regional bell operating companies all of whom will be intimately involved in this network in the future and you can't say that's a monopoly there's seven of them and what we don't often talk about is that there are another hundred or so significant independent phone companies that are players in this the same is true of the cable industry while there is some consolidation going on it's inconceivable to me that we will have a situation where there's as few as two or three big operators there's 11,200 systems held by four or five hundred corporate entities and if I were to see my worst nightmare it would collapse down to maybe 12 big operators that's still not a monopoly but the most important thing was what Bob said there's a difference between the infrastructure and the content there are a hundred plus information services that are primarily entertainment oriented that the cable industry deals with from satellites those same services are being deployed today by competitors to cable in the form of direct broadcast satellite multi-channel microwave distribution and several other ways so I see this as being actually the way that the issue of monopoly is being dealt with in this country it simply is too diverse of business information with too many people thinking that it's something they should do or want to do for me to see it in any rational way becoming so concentrated that the issue of monopoly is concerned to us it's the only possible way I see for dangerous areas if the U.S. government were to do what it did back in World War I and nationalize the information industry and I don't see that happening perhaps another force Carl Malamud has often talked about a book which would be a best seller which given the cheapness of the technology and the ubiquity of the standards is how you can be your own phone company on your own block in your city so that will break the last monopoly levels PUCs the public utility commissions that regulate phone companies are now opening up the last mile the local monopoly to open competition and these new technologies will drive Michael you were going to say something. That's a quick point the caller asked about the dangers of over-concentration of media and we do worry about that and that's why we have two principles we're trying to pursue one is universal service which we've talked about the other is something we call open access universal service means how can we ensure that everybody can receive information open access means how can we ensure that anybody who has information to put on the network is able to do so and can pay a fair price for that privilege and that may require some regulation we probably don't think so because in the end we do think we'll see a very competitive marketplace where satellite cable phone companies are all competing to provide information to people but if we end up in a situation where we have just a couple players controlling the networks we may need regulation to ensure that those network providers are not discriminating against some product programming to the benefit of others so that we have that system today and we may have to carry that forward into the new world of digital services but we suspect not we suspect that when we end up with thousands of different network providers all competing to provide bits to the home and to the businesses around this country that there'll be lots of different channels lots of different ways to get information products to people but we do have to focus on that it is one of the dangers it's the nightmare scenario the nightmare scenario is one big monopoly controlling the network and controlling what information goes into your television or your computer and we're going to avoid that at all costs the underlying technology here is all digital so the reason to be optimistic is that the entrepreneurial spirit around the world will take any putative monopoly any standard that's going to be controlled by somebody can take the bits and can free that customer from a monopoly supplier and customers want choices it's a simple rule it's true around the world and in every case where monopolies have sprung up in communications and in computing ultimately other choices have come up as those monopolies have become either arrogant or have not served their customers with the development and radio technology for example spread spectrum technology which was inconceivable ten years ago in a broad sense and again that's driven by the microprocessor revolution and by the use of extremely high digital computing the merger is going to drive that and will keep us I think free at least at the technological level from this threat the only danger to really worry about is the consolidation of content ultimately the development of say a monopoly brand that everyone wants to buy the good news is that is also a highly competitive industry and it's unlikely that all the content would come under the control of any single individual. We decide the other people's ideas have a bad taste and we have good taste in its variety. If you look at the energy level around the world that everyone become a publisher in cyberspace you know everyone wants to connect their schools and their homes our customers are spending enormous amounts of energy and time getting themselves on to cyberspace in our customers case the network for commerce communication with the customers improving their business effectiveness that focus is something which we didn't mandate it's something that they want to do they're going to drive it and they have open access into that network by virtue of the principles of the internet. And the technology is so cheap that almost anybody can become a publisher. Carl is shown. Carl's a publisher. You have an email you have a question. They were listening to this discussion and a question is from Martin Williams and he said what the panelists thought would be the effect on the network if the PTT's changed their thinking and started charging users for kilobytes received rather than time on the phone line. Oh my. And I guess I'd look at that and say you know the question is should telephone companies be publishers or maybe should we change our thoughts about how we charge for services. If you follow in a competitive market the answer will be yes some PTT's will do that and they will also have some other PTT's who are their competitors in alternative charging scheme. So as these markets evolve you as a consumer will have a choice of paying hopefully one way or the other. This is the challenge for the phone companies. A friend of mine who works at AT&T has commented that the challenge for the phone companies in the next five years is to determine how to completely change their price structure and not go out of business. Because the minute you start charging by the bit voice becomes very inexpensive and you won't be able to charge ten cents a minute for a long distance phone call anymore. So AT&T goes to Hollywood is the answer. I've thought about this a lot in recent years because it seems sort of inevitable that everything we deliver certainly on cable networks and clearly on the phone networks is going to be digitized, it's going to be bits, it's going to be highly compressed and as a technologist you know I know a fundamental truth which is a single bit is a single bit and it looks like any other bit. However the question becomes is a bit delivering a rerun of Laverne and Shirley of the same value as the bit representing the decimal point in my bank balance and I would submit that those are clearly different values and the question is how exactly is there an economical way for me to weigh each bit and decide what to charge because they clearly have different value structures. That leads me to the inescapable conclusion that our future in all this is going to be based probably on connectivity as opposed to a charge for bits because bit wrangling as it were is going to be too complicated and too expensive and will load the overhead. By the way was it the TV show that was more expensive? More valuable. We have a call from Mexico City possibly hello, Mexico City. Hello Yes, could you identify yourself and your organization? Monica Mistreza from Mexico City Business Magazine Expansion Yes and your question... Can you hear me? Yes, we hear you well. Okay, well you talk about universal access and on the other hand you show regions where there are limited resources for infrastructure. What would be your advice for authorities in countries like Mexico or another developing country? Where do we start? Would that be related? An excellent question Shall I repeat the question? Where for those countries that have a great deal of infrastructure that needs to be invested in and put in place, where do they start? What sector do they focus on? Where should it be the schools? I'm just extrapolating on the question. Should it be the schools? Should it be the hospitals? Should it be the university or higher education institutions? Where is the greatest leverage in development? Well, Bob... I was going to say that as far as policy, the first step really is to deregulate, privatize, liberalize the marketplace. A number of countries in Latin America have been very aggressive moving forward to privatize their phone company and to bring in competitors often with foreign capital who can build out their infrastructure very quickly. In some countries we've seen a tripling in the number of telephones in five or six years because a new competitor has come into the marketplace, has been allowed to compete fairly and the investment and the new services provided have been just phenomenal. Chile is one good example. I know Mexico is taking steps, particularly with the new technologies, cellular technologies. We're seeing a real explosion in investment and in service and I think that's to be encouraged and in the end you'll serve the people of your country better by providing choice by allowing competition with the old PTT. In too many countries the PTTs have decided that they can make the most money by serving the richest five or six percent of the population charging them three times the going rate and leaving it at that. Anybody who really looks at the business model determines that best way to make money is to serve the entire population and charge fair prices but the PTTs won't do that unless there's real competition. An example would be Itesim in Mexico with the private technical university having its own transponder creating its own infrastructure using the internet to teach in 26 cities throughout Mexico just doing it because there were no alternatives. And the internet is a very easy way to get into the global telecommunications marketplace. You're a university, a small business and there's a lot of ways you can use the internet to meet your communication needs without having to necessarily go through the PTT and pay exorbitant international rates. Let's see another videotape again shot at these two schools showing just how the kids are using the internet. How it fits into a more traditional, the past ways of schooling. So let's take a look at our second interview from Ravenswood. The computer lab at Hollister's Fremont School teaches computer skills and basic curricula through interactive programs. The computers are obsolete offering only 512k of memory. We'll have kids come to the computer center and everybody will load up. You know, maybe a science simulation. Hey, it's a great simulation. It's interactive and yet everybody simultaneously is doing the same thing and the systems that we have aren't smart enough to really be able to truly adapt to individual needs. Many of the programs are game based and the atmosphere is a social one. But after playing with the programs a few times students become bored and learning stops. You guys done this before? Yeah. How many times? About 50. Yeah. What's new this time? Nothing. There's cameras. What we're going through right now is internet connectivity. Once you get out there, how are you going to use it? There's just so many different things you can do with the internet. Do you supplement your curriculum or do you focus your curriculum around the internet? The lab at Ravenswood's McNair School, supported by NASA, offers the students access to the net. Teachers encourage self-directed research and students seem genuinely engaged. Computers can do what I wish I could do as a teacher is give every single student one-on-one instantaneous feedback to whatever they do. Then when you have that going on, what happens to discipline problems? They're non-existent. In Hollister, administrators are not convinced the benefits outweigh the costs. PathBail was offering to come in and connect us up to the future information highway but nobody was really, and they were going to do that for free, which seemed really great, but it seemed like there was some possibility of some significant long-term costs without a clear vision of what the benefits were going to be. Once we were hooked up, what were we going to do with it? We really didn't know. Individual teachers, however, have taken significant steps. This year, Daria Peterson participated in a state-sponsored telemetering program. She was trained in the use of telecommunications and is bringing the benefits back to the classroom. I'm involved with my fourth grade students in a social science project, and it's about their roots and their accessing information from everywhere, from the library, from the CDs, from email connections. There's that African saying that's often quoted that it takes a whole village to raise a child, and here we have 30 children grouped together in a classroom with one teacher. We could have a village raising those classrooms of children because we have links out to many, many people, and that's why the kind of thing that you're involved in is very important because what we are doing is we are organizing a community of people who take responsibility for what goes on in those individual classrooms. I like that. A compelling vision, which eludes implementation, is a false promise. Can new technologies create new behaviors? Those questions posed by those children I think really do bring out the reason we chose education as a focal point for this discussion. The needs of those students, the special group, focuses the rest of us who are used to using all this information technology to our purposes on what those two board kids brought out. After putting a lot of money into computers and schools, but not connecting them to anything, that one kid, the statement that he said that really got me, let me show you, I wrote it on my pad here, he said when he asked what are you doing, said I've been doing this how many times have you done it? About 50 times. Just drill, just repetition. How does he integrate, came back to the other teacher at Ravenswood who said our challenge is to integrate the internet into the curriculum. How do we change our teaching? How do we take what our community does, the access that we have into educational materials and integrate all of this new stuff in this, build a new community. To help us discuss these issues, we're joined now by Deborah Kaplan who is from the World Institute on Disability, clearly because your chair has replaced the other chair, and you've spent an enormous amount of effort and organized a large number of people to talk about the issues for those with disabilities for access. And I always think in an illustration of how important this is, no one understands when you first fix something, what the long run implications would be and an example would be, when for you to cross the street, cuts in curbs began to appear 20 years ago in cities around the world, you couldn't cross the street with a curb and tell those cuts were there. Now you can, as well as can people with baby carriages, shopping carts, all the population benefits from the changes made for more open access to everyone. So in the work you're doing now, how do we answer the questions of the educational community about opening access and integrating this new access into what they do? How are the issues for the disabled, for those with disabilities reflected in this dialogue? The issue that was raised earlier is one that is very consistent for people with disabilities and that is that users need to have many choices. It's difficult to predict the circumstances of the end user of technology whether it's a child in school who wants to use the technology at the same time that a slide presentation is going on and so the room is rather dark, or whether it's a person whose vision is impaired and that's something that they carry around with them at all times. If the user has a choice over the size of the test or whether they want to hear the information or see the information, but it's the same information then the user is in control and the information will serve most people in the most circumstances. And so what we believe is that by focusing on people who have disabilities and looking at what is a necessity for somebody with a disability, we are building into the systems and the applications that all people hopefully will eventually be able to use the most flexibility to meet the most needs, but we're building in a guarantee that most everybody else will be able to use it most of the time too. There's been an assumption that the needs of people with disabilities are somehow different than the needs of other people and we have to live down this concept of being called special people which means different people because we're not and I think we also have to take into account the demographics of the population around the world that many of us are getting older and we are going to acquire disabilities as we age and that they're going to be gradual. The technology that we are all becoming more and more dependent on every day ought to be able to serve us in our entire life spans. We're not going to want to give it up as we get older just because we can't hear so well, we can't see so well, or our range of reach has been diminished and so we need to design our technology with everybody in many situations across all age spans in mind. Just as this broadcast is closed captions for the hearing impaired that suddenly allows the computer community to take the text of a video program and make the video searchable so now you can read with much greater power because you can find those things you're interested in, it's embedded in that video stream. The Walkman is just books for the blind but suddenly brought to the broad population those doing readings for the blind far anticipated the need for a small portable cassette device. Eric you were going to comment on one of the elements in designing those devices at the end, you representing the computer industry these things are ugly and hard to use with keyboards and trying to draw with a mouse and all those problems people have are the interfaces into these software systems being designed with any intelligence so that we'll be able to amplify people's access. They are now and we've seen a tremendous improvement in sort of the sensitivity to flexibility in system architecture. Historically these systems were designed as boxes with specific functions and the customer focus which I completely agree with is giving customers substitutability. They can substitute one kind of a keyboard for another well guess what they can also substitute a keyboard that they can use or a different kind of input device that they can use again the rise of the microprocessor, the rise of performance allows us to do things that we didn't have enough performance to do before we can do voice synthesis as necessary, we can do visual analysis and then relay that using other communication means, tactile feedback etc there's much research both at Sun and in other companies in this area and I think it's an exciting area. We have a call from Venezuela, is our caller still on the line? Hello? I'm happy the communications industry is here, can we fix this please? I can't hear you, I'm sorry in Venezuela. Yes, now we can. This is a topic for those that could not hear clearly both in Venezuela but worldwide a major problem with the network is security. Anyone here in this room in Washington DC saw yesterday's front page New York Times discussing severe break-ins on the internet. If you were in Silicon Valley that same story was transmuted by the local newspaper the San Jose Mercury News into headlines that were as large as declaration of war because of the break-ins using this very complicated network technology. Bob, before we talk about security on the issues that Deborah brought up about access you're trying to bring or you have brought all of the major builders of information technology together in a room. Do these issues come up in these meetings? Yes, they do and I think the one message that I would like to communicate to everybody is that we all need to be sensitive to the needs of all people to be able to get into these networks and use them. I might point out that knowledge about what is out there is essentially a barrier for many people at this point. There is so much out there, there is so much diversity is growing at such a rapid rate that just the lack of knowledge about what's out there is actually a severe disability for most people. In that sense, when you're talking about kids in school they are very disabled in that sense because they don't know what's out there, they have to learn it, it's a training experience for them but I would go so far as to say that for almost everybody in society including those people who are the experts, there's so much going on that it's very hard to know and in some sense that's a real disability for everybody to have to learn to deal with. Now you can have technology that can help with it but ultimately the interfaces are only the first step down that path. It's what we know and what's in our heads and what we can gain the benefit of by virtue of technology to help us with these capabilities that will determine our ability to make effective use of an internet and NII and all the capabilities that go along with it. So becoming more intelligent in our use is it the children that are developing this intelligence? I've noticed in all of the web browsing that the ones most active in creating new things generally tend to be the kids who have just decided to do something. Well there's clearly the creation side of it. Intelligence is a relative thing. People can be more curious, more creative than what they do but I think there's also the issue of just what you know and how you learn what you know independent of how much intelligence you then bring to bear on your search. Many people may be dealing with problems that are fairly mundane. Others may be trying to use this facility in very advanced and far reaching ways to conduct research versus just be entertained and I think the limitations that are imposed on us at the current time are pretty severe in terms of just what we know about what's out there and I think that's an area that we need to focus hard on in the future. On this question of security from Venezuela the access, you find something, now how do you know it came from people that say they said it? How do you know it's authentic? Are the protocols and standards for that evolving rapidly? Clearly there's been a lot of discussion about this class of topics and it's not a new problem area. It's certainly not one that for which solutions could not be developed and imposed. The problem is to do it in a way that's commensurate with our everyday use of facilities. If you wanted to build real security into society you may end up with a society that you don't like very much. On the other hand, if you relax the constraints so that you're more comfortable with the society generally then you may have incidents where security is really a problem and I think striking a balance where the potential risks are outweighed by advantages where the costs are brought into balance, where people get choices, where people who need more and may have to pay for it, can in fact make that choice, where people who don't care about it or are willing to take the risks can make that choice is really what this is all about in the future. There's clearly been a lot of thought about this topic for many years but exactly what the right strategy is I think is going to have to evolve. The burglary yesterday leads on. Eric? Security I think is going to be the big drag on the explosion and impact of the internet. People that I talk with say, sounds fun but call me when I'm and let me know when I should believe that this stuff is not going to be stolen. So the development of a true global infrastructure that is one where you can do electronic commerce, where people can rely on digital signatures, where forgeries can be shown to be forgeries, those kinds of things await new protocols and new globally accepted standards for this. Sun, for example, has a product called the Netra that we just introduced which provides additional security services for our customers. There are other products being introduced into this space. I believe that the long-term solution here will involve a very, very powerful encryption technology which will be done at a level that you are not aware of. In other words, your application will look the same but the transmission of that data and the communication will be done in an encrypted form. We know that networks can never be made completely secure. It's always possible for someone somewhere in the network that surrounds the world to get in there and break in. But if you have a certainty that your information, once there's a break occurred, cannot be then discovered. If they can't steal your credit card, if you look at the caller's question, they're asking, what about your credit card? Well, how do you know that that credit card number wasn't taken by an interloper? And the answer is through encryption. And we'll see that in 1995, I believe, is the year where the security infrastructure will be announced and delivered in its first systems. And I think 1996 will be the year where we'll begin to see interesting, powerful, commercial applications where people are really doing business on the net. And that will again be the next stage of growth of this phenomenon. We will talk about this in a later segment on the show. Yes, Michael. I'm just going to add real quickly that security is one of the issues I spend the most time on because security is fundamental to two problems. The protection of privacy and the protection of intellectual property rights. I think those are the two showstopper issues. And if we don't address those issues, we're not going to see people use the information highway. And if we don't have security, we don't have either of those. We don't have secure networks. You can't protect privacy. You can't protect the information that people put on it. We are developing new technologies. We just recently published a U.S. government standard for digital signatures. This has been something this has waited 10, 15 years for. And this is something we will use in the U.S. government to validate that a document came from the person who signed it. We also are moving forward to build government systems that can be models of secure systems. And we are working with the Internet community to see what we can do to improve the security of a system that wasn't designed to be secure. It's always difficult to go back and add an extra layer of security on, but we are trying to do that. We need this security in order to do all the things we want to do to transfer government documents, to provide electronic benefits like food stamps and welfare payments online. All of this requires a secure network and we are spending a lot of time on that issue. Collect taxes. You've got to remember there's an income and an outcome. We have found that we can do electronic tax filing now and millions of people are taking advantage of it. Now the way that you talked about this is in a way the way Deborah talked about making access more available. The addition of security and systems not originally designed that way should be invisible. There should be addition of new capabilities that allow more people to use. And it should just happen so that they should all flow together. That's how you describe this, I think, Deborah. I think what it means for the industry is that there are many other people in many other sectors of our society that companies that think their only handling technology have to start becoming aware of and getting good at relating to. Industry isn't going to solve all these problems by itself and they're a vital interest of society, education, transacting business, operations of government that are all involved. This is a very special kind of technology because of the way that all of us are going to want to use it. And in new and unexpected ways. Carl, did you have an email? Was there a relevant email? Not on that subject. I did have a comment if I might. A lot of people look at security like some monolithic thing. I mean, security will appear and all of a sudden our problems will be solved and I think it's important to look at cyberspaces being no different than the real world in which cities are messy places and there will be dangerous areas and safer areas and we have a variety of tools that are available today and as Eric said they will start moving out very widely in 1995. But for example, we're currently stamping all SEC and patent documents with the digital signature. Eventually the government will do that but until then there's technology available to take intermediate steps. Just like today there are problems with passwords. People are using one-time passwords and the tools are there and people that are doing business on the net. I mean it's not like it's a place where you can only read pornography and have school children do elementary schools. There are businesses that are depending on the network to get purchase orders and it works. This leads Bob. You've often talked about bringing a higher level of professionalism or a way to make the new users able to rely on this. Now there have been threats to close things down. This article yesterday in New York Times a burglary occurred and there's an enormous amount of discussion stirred up by this. What's the proper framework to look at this in? Part of the solution clearly will be in technology. The kind of things that Eric was talking about before as they come down the pike. Carl's point is right on. Security is not a monolithic thing. Either you have it everywhere or you don't have it anywhere. In fact you will have it in various forms and in fact in some ways the least secure places are likely to be closest to the end user. Maybe right in their own workspace or their own home where they don't want the encumbrances but in fact things are still available or maybe they radiate or whatever. Seems to me that one of the issues is education. In areas where copyright violations have taken place in many cases it's because people do not understand what the law is like in their own country or what it implies for them or what is fair and what is not fair or what ought to be done. Just no appreciation at all and so I think educating people in some of the intellectual property sides of things would be a great boon but besides that it seems to me that you have a situation here where for the most part the network technology has grown up historically of a research community that has really wanted to be very expansive even eclectic in the kinds of things that it worked on. There's a terminology that has come out of the artificial intelligence community. They talk about the needs and the scruffies and in some sense the kind of the business space that we know of in the country historically has been fairly neat in the sense of well managed, fairly professional, tied in tightly to all the laws and regulations and the internet has sort of grown up in a kind of scruffy way historically. And when I talk about the need for more professionalism I think it's basically getting this whole technology which has been sort of scruffy to be a little neater as we move into the realm where you have laws that apply and you have needs for security and you have liabilities and business opportunities that all need to be blended together to make it work and I think you can't rely entirely on the research community to make this terribly neat. You've got to get another level of professionalism built into the process and I think it's inevitable that that will happen as this becomes more and more widespread and part of our infrastructure. Let me just go to a video that illustrates this again with the children in the two elementary schools and we'll come back and Eric you can make your point. May we see the third illustration of internet access and children. You guys are going to be doing this today. Mo Zayek, it's a fun place to go. See these areas that are highlighted? I've always wanted schooling to be a lifelong lifelong process. When I was teaching in the seventh grade I had folks that were scoring on the college level on these exams and I had folks that were scoring on the second grade level okay. Throw them in front of a computer they can go on ahead and they can go at their own pace. I've wanted the homes to be involved as much as the schools taking responsibility. We're going to also have a dial up modem program where you can call from any location and be able to dial into the network. Parents will be able to get more involved in their homework because they'll be able to call up and have the reference materials right there at hand. I want students to understand that the moment you wake up you're in a learning environment. We're going to take as many tools away from the internet to help us go on ahead and expand our own curriculum and we can also use simple stuff like email. And I see that super highway is not only that connection between families and students in schools but also global connection. Through that process, through that communications I see a way of developing all the skills. Once you go on ahead and be creative and think of some questions you want to ask them. They have key pals with Oracle, they have them with Woodside school and they have them with folks over in Germany. Hi, welcome to the link between the White House and the internet. We're pleased to be able to provide that interactive citizen's email. Who are you sending an email to? President Clinton. What are you going to say? To fix East Palo Alto. Are you ready to send it? Yeah. It's going, it's looking for it. And there it goes. I would love to see all districts whether they be affluent or not are low income. Be able to come online all together. You don't find children shy away from computers like adults. Will new technologies help break down barriers? Well, we have a guest joining us to discuss this new area. Will new technologies break down barriers? Will new technologies bring new services? Will the discussion of security, provision of security let us establish banks, let us establish transaction systems, let us do commerce on the network. There's a whole new level evolving and Dr. Marshall Rose, who's a principal of First Virtual has been developing the protocols, the methods of creating commerce on the internet or in another way reliable communication on the internet. So I know it's you that's saying something to me and you know it's me saying something to you and turning that into trustable means of doing business, of doing commerce, of exchanging things. I thought to go back to that video tape, it was a bit difficult to hear but when that fourth grader was asked what are you sending mail to the President of the United States about he didn't say come visit my school or I'd like to have a change in education. He said fix East Palo Alto because he knows how desperate the straits are for many places in the world and certainly for his city. So this is a message from a fourth grader to the President of the United States now made easily, he can make that communication very easily. So let me open the discussion Marshall in asking you, you're at the edge, at the new creation edge of building commerce on the network. From what I can see it's exploding. Yet we have these newspaper articles about security breaks on the network. How can we ever do commerce? Is there a hope that we can repair these breaks and can we get past the weaknesses of the network? Well I think the first thing to realize is that the world is an inherently unsafe place and if you look at any commerce mechanism devised by mankind whether it's you're talking about banking with a coin of the realm or whether you're talking about bank cards or check drafts all of them have inherent within them the possibility for fraud and over the course of centuries or decades or years we've basically learned to build into those systems the cost of doing business of protecting against the fraud minimizing it and living with it. So in a sense you know I guess the message I'd like to respond with is we need to try to get away from this romanticism of computer science that somehow we can solve hard problems just by throwing computers at them because as we know all computers are really our accelerators and if you're good at doing something computers make you better and if you're bad at doing something computers make you worse end of statement. By the way why are you two in suits if I could just because he's coming from a meeting and going to a meeting and I just got talked into it I suppose. Well I mean talking business should be the suits who are talking to business. The suits talk to business. In fact you have to realize that in spite of major corporations business is scruffy and business retail is on the streets and that's where the volume of transactions are. That's where when you're presented with a check you make sure that the person giving you the check can sign it and these discussions about governmental policy and digital signature seem to imply we've built a new kind of bank where you have a way of signing a check. Now should we believe this? Well Marshall if I agree with what you said it seems to me that at the end of the day there are laws that every country is going to apply to cyberspace for example the recent break ends are violations so it would appear to be violations of numerous state and federal statutes and our government is investigating those and eventually if they can apprehend the people who violated the laws I'm sure they'll be dealt with every country has slightly different laws in this area and there will be a difference some countries will be more liberal some countries will be more conservative as it is true today so as we build cyberspace you're going to have to deal with the conflict between government and worldwide sort of philosophies I don't think we should be surprised by that I mean I agree with you that this notion of some romantic community there's no precedent for a 30 million person community that does not have at least a few people who don't want to follow the rules. That's when you start a new town in a pioneer area out in the frontiers in Venezuela or you put a safe in place before you can do business that's why they had sheriffs in the old west. We just had a question from Robert Ells coming from Australia before I came over here and he asked the question of in a land of national laws can we have a global information infrastructure will we ever have a global internet because of all these different national laws and different national treatments? Well it will be uneven there will be some countries that will actively try to prevent the communication of free expression because guess what we have those today there are countries that try to restrict free communication free expression things that we take for granted certainly in the United States there are other countries that will be even more liberal and we see some of the effects of that as some of the shall we say forbidden information comes into the United States or violates various laws that we have that will surprise us people will deal with us. Why don't we take Carl's question and turn it around why don't we say doesn't the existence of things like the internet basically make national law and national tastes effectively irrelevant I mean if you think about moving around information strictly in digital form now I mean it's not as if when some data from Sweden enters the United States that there is someone from customs who is examining the bits as they go by at T1 or T3 speeds what is the effect of having a policy that you can't enforce? Oh because people obey laws if certain types of pornography violates community standards and that's illegal maybe you can't stop it at the border but if you do something in that city you get arrested and you go to jail it's that simple and real laws apply in cyberspace and I think we can do that it's harder to have customs I'll grant you that but we can still have laws. Governments believe they add value and they believe that they will add value in the area and they'll find a way to do it. Well in governments the national security agency does in fact attempt to trap all those bits as it goes by and read them there are interests, many conflicting interests on this flow of information when you're establishing a transaction where someone's attempting to buy something usually some form of intellectual property on the internet and they're in Sweden and the computer on which the intellectual property resides is in California or in Venezuela whose taxes do you pay? Well everybody. Well or nobody so you are, Deborah I'm sorry I think it'll get sorted out those things usually do. I'd like to talk or react to this idea though that we have to disabuse ourselves of the romance of the net. I think the technology and the ways that we are using it as illustrated by the internet mean that there are real differences, issues of internationalization and international communication and democracy and the potential there for individual freedom. The net does make a difference. I think it also there's the myth of the net that shouldn't be disabused that we all behave a little bit better and that people cooperate more and it somehow allows us to rise above some of our more base instincts. It will be used for commerce and commerce brings out other instincts but I think there are real potentials that ought to be exploited by people who would like to see us move in some better directions for all of society to increase educational opportunities to increase the standards of certain communities and to try to pull with the romance of the net against the other forces that are working towards commercialization and working towards leaving everything up to the marketplace. I think there are certain inherent qualities that those who wish to see things get better can seize upon and take advantage of while it's all still new and while we are in a bit of a romantic stage of the relationship with technology. So you would like the romantic stage to continue as the teachers said here we are in Hollister and we didn't really see any value to getting the kids on the net and the other school was in the romantic. Everything was wonderful. We're now suddenly the children are able to go worldwide and see things. So that phase where will this I'm sorry. I think it's time to start surfacing the real examples of where life has changed for people. The real examples where the net has made a difference in ways that were unexpected that brought people together that created feelings of community amongst people who wouldn't ordinarily have that in other ways and to show that things that all of us crave for can be accomplished and to capitalize expand on them and to pull programs and pull policy out of what we're learning about what technology can do. You know I think we should ask everyone watching for those examples. One of the results of a broadcast like this is this is a television broadcast when it vanishes although it will stay on discs and tapes the web pages with the pointers to those sites that are doing this live on and grow and I would urge everyone that's watching this broadcast all of you in the audience if you have an example and you should because your parents and you should be doing something about your child or your sister's child school and how they're connected into this enormous growing exploding romantic exciting place and if you're not doing something about it then you ought to. If you would mail to the same address that we've been putting on the screen references to those examples. I think you're exactly right. We have to tie people to people let people explore other romantic John these are not necessarily mutually exclusive it's a pretty good guess that the net will be much larger and also will have many virtual communities and there will be a community which is based on the principles that the internet was founded on. There will also be communities of people who are in there to transact their business and their value system and off they go. There will be research communities there will be scientific communities there will be affinity communities fans of OJ Simpson those sorts of things and we should expect that the specialization of interest will continue because the technology allows that it's again it's an empowering technology. Carl you have built an access to things that were invisible before you put up government databases you put up material paid for by governments but not visible to the citizens because it costs too much. Right things like patent documents or securities exchange commission documents. All that and you just put it up so that means that those interested in involving themselves in affinity in examining other communities suddenly had a free pathway to do it. Well you know there was a theory that this information would not be useful to people that ordinary citizens wouldn't want to see SEC documents or patent documents and therefore the effort wasn't necessary to put them on the net and the thing we found is that when we put the securities and exchange commission documents on they were immediately popular. Ten thousand documents a day are now going out and the industry that sells those documents is beginning to support us because they found that their market has now increased. And so these goals are you know you can have a commercial sector out there and you also have public interest in the two work together. Libraries help teach people how to read and then those people go to book stores and they buy books and so you can have both of the pieces. Again cyberspace is part of the real world and we have to make sure that we understand that we're going to need public parks as well as commercial transactions as well as different types of places where different communities can gather and talk to each other. There's been examples of this for example when videotapes came out. Could you go over to shows that you wired? Sure. What do you want to see? There are many examples of this. When videotapes came out people were concerned that movie going would go down. In fact movie going went up. These technologies are additive. They're not subtractive. The popularity of communication is a win for society. It's a win for businesses. It's a win for individuals. It's a win for publishers. And that's what's so exciting about what we're trying to do in this overall industry represented by this discussion. We also are broad policy initiatives that the net makes possible and the net invites that call for interests that often are competitive, companies that often compete with each other to rise above that competitive usual way of doing things and work together for broader social goals. The communications technology makes that possible and in the case of education of children actually invites it. That's not going to happen unless people who usually compete with each other, people who might be distrustful of each other rise above that and work together to make something happen that otherwise won't happen. Government alone isn't going to solve the problem of connecting schools to networks. It's not going to solve the problem of training the teachers and creating a real learning atmosphere that goes from community to community. And there are many issues like that where citizens, companies and government are really going to have to work together and then that will make it more possible. I think of what Marshall's created when you began this notion that it would be possible for anyone in the world with safety to exchange, to read something and if they like to pay the people that created it, suddenly bringing to the level of the individual creator this entire distribution mechanism. So Peter Gabriel who's at the top level of creating things could put something out on the network as could any child that plays an instrument that believes someone else would be, but those that would like to be paid now have a mechanism. What's the growth in this? You've been available on the network for... Our payment system went live in October of last year and I think really the motivation you touched on a lot is that the cost of entry for becoming an information publisher giving the ubiquity and ever increasing ubiquity of the internet is quite low so that really all you need to be able to do is create some kind of intellectual property represent it digitally and then make it available on the internet through the web or FTP or something like that and what our system does is provide a mechanism for that information commerce for once someone decides to actually make a sale for some kind of payment to occur as a result of that and the real power here is that you really get four things being leveraged on the same infrastructure. You get the ability to do marketing over the internet, the ability to basically do some kind of sales and then our system added the ability to do payment and then in addition you get the support so you have all of these different things reusing the same infrastructure and the same technologies and that results in a tremendous cost savings in terms of the production and distribution and all of the cost of inventory effectively just goes away and so as a result there's a new economic model being formed which honestly we quite don't understand fully yet with respect to internet information commerce and you know our system is just one very small part of that. In all this discussion recently about changing the economies of all countries and in the United States of course the new speaker of the house Newt Gingrich gives these eloquent discussions of which could be I think given by Vice President Gore identically they both agree that there is something new happening that we do not yet understand and the economists I think would take what you've just said and call it not the economies of scale of the past where large factories create massive identical things and the price and the cost goes down but economies of scope where the mechanism that provides delivery provides all the other entities for in your case distribution, sales, support all of those things that used to be different channels are now supported by the same infrastructure. Carl you're typing away over there you put up for those in Europe in Asia in South America the governmental entity in the United States that receives all accounting information from all corporations salaries of the president all the accounting information about what they did in the past year that used to cost $100 a page you've now put up the securities and exchange document let's say I can see it on the screen allowing anyone in the world in Moscow in Johannesburg in Buenos Aires to insert the name of a company and receive as of a day ago or minutes ago the most recent financial data the very now does this mechanism exist in Europe not in this format at all does it exist in South America and the country not in this format this seems to be an enormously healthy I see you just scrolling through tremendously detailed numbers from some company out on the net. This is Sun Microsystem this is your last quarterly report. Does it make a ratio? Well I think a more interesting number might be the ratio of the president's salary to the amount of profit the company made. Now those kinds of numbers I'll need a few minutes for that one. That information is in here actually and if I knew financial documents a little bit better I could probably dig it out very quickly Have you used what volume of use have you seen of this? We're doing 10,000 SEC documents a day off our server there's several mirror servers that multiply that out we're doing about 5,000 documents a day for the patent office and as we get all the prior years of patent information up we think that number will go up substantially and now we're not doing this with the patent office of course we're doing this as an independent coalition of industry and universities it's called the information highway beautification fund and Sun and MCI and MIT University and several others are all part of this operation. So by beautification you mean swamping everyone a large amount of information and allowing them to find their way through it. Well we have search tools you do keyword searches you can we have alert services that lets you know certain kinds of information when it comes in. They're specialized searchers for things like mutual funds for example if you want to check up on your investment fund and so just because the raw data is there doesn't mean you have to read it all it's like a big bookstores are good but it doesn't mean you're going to read every book in it. Your mention of that brings up a note that I should mention in closing all of the books that Marshall Rose has recommended the books that I have recommended actually that documents visible on the screen we've placed in web pages the references and Deborah I hope to have examples of places doing inspirational things that we can all learn from all of those are on the web pages come to the original web address I suppose if you come to www.sun.com there will be a pointer to all of the synergy reading recommendations and documents Bob Kahn has a list all of those that were on the panel who might thank for coming. Can I show you one more database before you end I know your director is about to kill you but we have the U.S. Congress up on the internet now. Well good does it show campaign contributions. No this is live from the floor of the U.S. House and U.S. setup. What we're hearing now is a live broadcast done by a computer on a desktop directly from the floor of the U.S. and this is going worldwide digitized on the internet and it's also stored on a hard disk. Our next broadcast will do exactly this we are of course on the worldwide M-Bone with all the video of us looking in suits as professional as we can it comes out on the world the worldwide multicast backbone as well as on satellite and our next broadcast in the U.S. will focus on the software development tools necessary to build secure products to enable you to be convinced and to convince your customers that what you've made in software can run safely on their machines. I'd like to thank the panel I'd like to thank the audience from Comnet those of you here in Washington have a busy three days of visiting all exhibits learning about the new security products and thank you very much.