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Network Working Working Group B. Kahin, Editor Request for Comments: 1192 Harvard

                                                         November 1990
                 Commercialization of the Internet
                          Summary Report

Status of this Memo

 This memo is based on a workshop held by the Science, Technology and
 Public Policy Program of the John F. Kennedy School of Government,
 Harvard University, March 1-3, 1990.
 This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
 not specify any standard.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Introduction

 "The networks of Stages 2 and 3 will be implemented and operated so
 that they can become commercialized; industry will then be able to
 supplant the government in supplying these network services."  --
 Federal Research Internet Coordinating Committee, Program Plan for
 the National Research and Education Network, May 23, 1989, pp. 4-5.
 "The NREN should be the prototype of a new national information
 infrastructure which could be available to every home, office and
 factory.  Wherever information is used, from manufacturing to high-
 definition home video entertainment, and most particularly in
 education, the country will benefit from deployment of this
 technology....  The corresponding ease of inter-computer
 communication will then provide the benefits associated with the NREN
 to the entire nation, improving the productivity of all information-
 handling activities.  To achieve this end, the deployment of the
 Stage 3 NREN will include a specific, structured process resulting in
 transition of the network from a government operation a commercial
 service."  -- Office of Science and Technology Policy, The Federal
 High Performance Computing Program, September 8, 1989, pp. 32, 35.
 "The National Science Foundation shall, in cooperation with the
 Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Department of
 Commerce, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and
 other appropriate agencies, provide for the establishment of a
 national multi-gigabit-per-second research and education computer
 network by 1996, to be known as the National Research and Education
 Network, which shall:
      (1) link government, industry, and the education

Kahin [Page 1] RFC 1192 Commercialization of the Internet November 1990

      community;
           ....
           (6) be established in a manner which fosters and
      maintains competition and private sector investment in high
      speed data networking within the telecommunications
      industry;
           ....
           (8) be phased out when commercial networks can meet the
      networking needs of American researchers."
  1. - S. 1067, 101st Congress, 2nd Session, as marked up April 3, 1990

["High-Performance Computing Act of 1990"], Title II, Section 201.

Background

 This report is based on a workshop held at the John F. Kennedy School
 of Government, Harvard University March 1-3, 1990, by the Harvard
 Science, Technology and Public Policy Program.  Sponsored by the
 National Science Foundation and the U.S.  Congress Office of
 Technology Assessment, the workshop was designed to explore the
 issues involved in the commercialization of the Internet, including
 the envisioned National Research and Education Network (NREN).
 Rather than recapitulate the discussion at the workshop, this report
 attempts to synthesize the issues for the benefit of those not
 present at the workshop.  It is intended for readers familiar with
 the general landscape of the Internet, the NSFNET, and proposals and
 plans for the NREN.
 At the workshop, Stephen Wolff, Director of the NSF Division of
 Networking and Communications Research and Infrastructure,
 distinguished "commercialization" and "privatization" on the basis of
 his experience developing policy for the NSFNET.  He defined
 commercialization as permitting commercial users and providers to
 access and use Internet facilities and services and privatization as
 the elimination of the federal role in providing or subsidizing
 network services.  In principle, privatization could be achieved by
 shifting the federal subsidy from network providers to users, thus
 spurring private sector investment in network services.  Creation of
 a market for private vendors would in turn defuse concerns about
 acceptable use and commercialization.

Commercialization and Privatization

 Commercialization.  In the past, many companies were connected to the
 old ARPANET when it was entirely underwritten by the federal
 government.  Now, corporate R&D facilities are already connected to,
 and are sometimes voting members of, mid-level networks.  There are
 mail connections from the Internet to commercial services such as

Kahin [Page 2] RFC 1192 Commercialization of the Internet November 1990

 MCIMAIL, SprintMail, and Compuserve.  DASnet provides a commercial
 mail gateway to and from the Internet and commercial mail services.
 UUNET, a nonprofit corporation, markets TCP/IP services (Alternet)
 with access to the Internet as well as mail services.  Performance
 Systems International (PSI), a startup company which now operates
 NYSERNET (the New York State regional network, partially funded by
 NSF) is aggressively marketing Internet-connected TCP/IP services on
 the East and West Coasts.  RLG is selling access to its RLIN database
 over the Internet directly to end users.  Other fee-based services
 include Clarinet, a private news filtering service, and FAST, a non-
 profit parts brokering service.  However, in all these cases, any use
 of the NSFNET backbone must, in principle, support the "purpose of
 the NSFNET."
 Under the draft acceptable use policy in effect from 1988 to mid-
 1990, use of the NSFNET backbone had to support the purpose of
 "scientific research and other scholarly activities."  The interim
 policy promulgated in June 1990 is the same, except that the purpose
 of the NSFNET is now "to support research and education in and among
 academic institutions in the U.S. by access to unique resources and
 the opportunity for collaborative work."  Despite this limitation,
 use of the NSFNET backbone has been growing at 15-20% per month or
 more, and there are regular requests for access by commercial
 services.  Even though such services may, directly or indirectly,
 support the purposes of the NSFNET, they raise prospects of
 overburdening network resources and unfair competition with private
 providers of network services (notably the public X.25 packet-
 switched networks, such as SprintNet and Tymnet).
 Privatization.  In some respects, the Internet is already
 substantially privatized.  The physical circuits are owned by the
 private sector, and the logical networks are usually managed and
 operated by the private sector.  The nonprofit regional networks of
 the NSFNET increasingly contract out routine operations, including
 network information centers, while retaining control of policy and
 planning functions.  This helps develop expertise, resources, and
 competition in the private sector and so facilitates the development
 of similar commercial services.
 In the case of NSFNET, the annual federal investment covers only a
 minor part of the backbone and the regional networks.  Although the
 NSFNET backbone is operated as a cooperative agreement between NSF
 and Merit, the Michigan higher education network, NSF contributes
 less than $3 million of approximately $10 million in annual costs.
 The State of Michigan Strategic Fund contributes $1 million and the
 balance is covered by contributed services from the subcontractors to
 Merit, IBM and MCI.

Kahin [Page 3] RFC 1192 Commercialization of the Internet November 1990

 At the regional level, NSF provides approximately 40% of the
 operating costs of the mid-level networks it funds -- with the
 remainder covered by membership and connection fees, funding from
 state governments, and in-kind contributions.  This calculation does
 not include a number of authorized networks (e.g., PREPnet, and,
 until recently, NEARnet and CERFnet) that receive no NSF funding.
 However, NSF also funds institutional connections to the NSFNET,
 which includes payments by the institution to the regional network.
 Other agencies (DOD, NASA, and DOE) have also funded some connections
 to NSFNET networks for the benefit of their respective research
 communities -- and have occasionally funded the networks directly.
 Finally, the campus-level networks at academic institutions probably
 represent a perhaps 7-10 times larger annual investment than the
 mid-level networks and the backbone together, yet there is no federal
 funding program at this level.  Furthermore, since these local
 networks must ordinarily be built by the institution rather than
 leased, there is an additional capitalization cost incurred by the
 institutions, which, annualized and aggregated, is perhaps another
 20-50 times the annual costs of the mid-level and backbone networks.
 (These figures are the roughest of estimates, intended only for
 illustration.)

The NSFNET Backbone as a Free Good

 Whereas the NSF funding of mid-level networks varies greatly -- from
 0% to 75% -- the backbone is available as a free good to the NSF-
 funded mid-level networks.  It is also used free of charge by other
 authorized networks, including networks not considered part of
 NSFNET: CSNET, BITNET, UUNET, and PSI, as well as the research
 networks of other federal agencies.  As noted, their use of the
 backbone is in principle limited to the support of academic research
 and education.
 Through their use of the NSFNET backbone, these networks appear to be
 enjoying a subsidy from NSF -- and from IBM, MCI, and the State of
 Michigan.  BITNET and some agency networks even use the backbone for
 their internal traffic.  Nonetheless, these other networks generally
 add value to NSFNET for NSFNET users and regional networks insofar as
 all networks benefit from access to each other's users and resources.
 However, small or startup networks generally bring in fewer network-
 based resources, so one side may benefit more than the other.  To the
 extent that the mail traffic is predominantly mailing lists (or other
 information resources) originating on one network, questions of
 imbalance and implicit subsidy arise.  For example, because of the
 mailing lists available without charge on the Internet, three times
 as much traffic runs over the mail gateway from the Internet to

Kahin [Page 4] RFC 1192 Commercialization of the Internet November 1990

 MCIMAIL as from MCIMAIL to the Internet.  This pattern is reinforced
 by the sender-pays fee structure of MCIMAIL, which discourages
 mailing list distribution from within MCIMAIL.
 The impact of such imbalances is not clear.  For now, the capacity of
 the NSFNET backbone is staying ahead of demand: It jumped from 56
 Kbps to 1.544 Mbps (T-1) in 1988 and will go to 45 Mbps over the next
 year.  But NSF is concerned about a possible recurrence of the
 congestion which drove users off the NSFNET prior to the 1988
 upgrade.  Given the tripling of campus-level connections over the
 past year, continued growth in users at each site, the parade of new
 resources available over the network, and, especially, the
 development of high-bandwidth uses, there is reason to fear that
 demand may again overwhelm capacity.
 Offering the NSFNET backbone at no cost to authorized networks both
 encourages undisciplined use of the backbone and inhibits private
 investment in backbone networks.  It constrains the development of a
 market for commercial TCP/IP services by diverting an established and
 rapidly growing user base to a subsidized resource.  Charging NSFNET
 regionals and other mid-level networks for the use of the NSFNET
 backbone would resolve this problem, but this would impose a
 substantial cost burden on the mid-level networks, which would in
 turn have to raise membership and connection fees dramatically.  To
 compensate, the NSF subsidy that now underwrites the backbone could
 be moved down the distribution chain to the users of the backbone --
 i.e., to the regional networks, to the campuses, or even to
 researchers themselves.
 Each option poses unique opportunities and problems.  In theory, the
 further down the chain the subsidy is pushed, the more accountable
 providers will be to end-user needs.  Funding in hands of researchers
 would make universities more responsive to researchers' networking
 needs.  Funding in the hands of universities would in turn make
 regional networks more responsive and competitive.  And funds for
 regional networks would spur a general market for backbone services.
 But the mechanisms for expressing user demand upward through these
 tiers are imperfect.  And, from an administrative standpoint, it is
 easier for NSF to simply provide one free backbone to all comers --
 rather than deal with 25 mid-level networks, or 500 universities, or
 perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of individual researchers.

Option: Funding Researchers

 It would be possible to earmark funds for network services in agency
 research grants as a matter of course, so that no new administrative
 process would be required.  But since network costs are presently not
 usage based, such funding will not readily translate into

Kahin [Page 5] RFC 1192 Commercialization of the Internet November 1990

 identifiable services and may simply end up in local overhead
 accounts since few institutions allocate out costs of access to the
 Internet.  The use of vouchers rather than cash add-ons might help
 ensure that federal resources are in fact applied to qualifying wide
 area network services -- and possibly avoid the imposition of
 standard institutional overhead on direct funding.  However, if
 vouchers can be sold to other institutions, as economists would
 advocate in the interests of market efficiency, these advantages may
 be compromised.  Even non-transferable vouchers may create a unique
 set of accounting problems for both funding agencies and
 institutional recipients.
 A federal subsidy channeled automatically to research grants could
 substantially limit or segregate the user community.  It would tend
 to divide the academic community by exacerbating obvious divisions
 between the resource-rich and resource-poor -- between federally
 funded researchers and other researchers, between scientists and
 faculty in other disciplines, and between research and education.
 Within the academic community, there is considerable sentiment for
 providing basic network services out of institutional overhead to
 faculty and researchers in all disciplines, at least as long as basic
 services remain unmetered and relatively low at the institutional
 level.  Of course, special costing and funding may well make sense
 for high-bandwidth usage-sensitive network services (such as remote
 imaging) as they become available in the future.

Option: Funding Institutions

 Alternatively, funding for external network services, whether in the
 form of cash or vouchers, could be provided directly to institutions
 without linking it directly to federal research funding.  As it is,
 institutions may apply for one-time grants to connect to regional
 networks, and these are awarded based on peer assessment of a number
 of different factors, not just the quality of the institution's
 research.  But redirecting the subsidy of the backbone could provide
 regular support at the institutional level in ways that need not
 involve peer review.  For example, annual funding might be tied to
 the number of PhD candidates within specific disciplines -- or to all
 degrees awarded in science.  Geographic location could be factored in
 -- as could financial need.  This, of course, would amount to an
 entitlement program, a rarity for NSF.  Nonetheless, it would allow
 institutions to make decisions based on their own needs -- without
 putting NSF in the position of judging among competing networks,
 nonprofit and for-profit.
 There are, however, questions about what sort of services the
 earmarked funding or vouchers could be used for.  Could they be used
 to pay the institution's BITNET fee?  Or a SprintNet bill?  Or to

Kahin [Page 6] RFC 1192 Commercialization of the Internet November 1990

 acquire modems?  For information services?  And, if so, what sort?
 Such questions force the funding agency to assume a kind of
 regulatory in an environment where competing equities, demonstrated
 need, technological foresight, and politics must be constantly
 weighed and juggled.

Option: Funding Regional Networks

 Shifting the subsidy to the regional networks is appealing in that it
 appears to be the least radical alternative and would only require
 allocating funds among some two dozen contenders.  Since most of the
 regional networks are already receiving federal funding, it would be
 relatively simple to tack on funds for the purchase of backbone
 services.  However, providing additional funding at this level
 highlights the problem of competition among mid-level networks.
 Although most regional networks are to some degree creatures of NSF,
 funded to ensure the national reach of NSFNET, they do not hold
 exclusive geographic franchises, and in some areas, there is
 competition between regionals for members/customers.  NSF grants to
 regional networks, by their very size, have an effect of unleveling
 the playing field among regionals and distorting competitive
 strengths and weaknesses.
 Alternet and PSI further complicate the picture, since there is no
 clear basis for NSF or other agencies to discriminate against them.
 The presence of these privately funded providers (and the possibility
 of others) raises difficult questions about what network services the
 government should be funding: What needs is the market now capable of
 meeting?  And where will it continue to fail?
 Experience with regulation of the voice network shows that it is
 inefficient to subsidize local residential service for everybody.  If
 one is concerned about people dropping off the voice network -- or
 institutions not getting on the Internet -- the answer is to identify
 and subsidize those who really need help.  The market-driven
 suppliers of TCP/IP-based Internet connectivity are naturally going
 after those markets which can be wired at a low cost per institution,
 i.e., large metropolitan areas, especially those with a high
 concentration of R&D facilities, such as Boston, San Francisco, and
 Washington, DC.  In the voice environment, this kind of targeted
 marketing by unregulated companies is widely recognized as cream-
 skimming.
 Like fully regulated voice common carriers (i.e., the local exchange
 carriers), the non-profit NSF-funded regional networks are expected
 to serve all institutions within a large geographic area.  In areas
 with few R&D facilities, this will normally result in a

Kahin [Page 7] RFC 1192 Commercialization of the Internet November 1990

 disproportionately large investment in leased lines.  Either remote
 institutions must pay for the leased line to the nearest network
 point of presence -- or the network must include the leased line as
 part of common costs.  If the regional network assumes such costs, it
 will not be price-competitive with other more compact networks.
 Accordingly, a subsidy redirected to the regional networks could be
 keyed to the density of the network.  This might be calculated by
 number of circuit miles per member institution or some form of
 aggregate institutional size, figured for either the network as a
 whole or for a defined subregion.  This subsidy could be available to
 both for-profit and non-profit networks, but only certain non-profit
 networks would meet the density requirement, presumably those most in
 need of help.

Increasing the Value of the Connection

 The principal advantage in underwriting the backbone is that it
 provides a evenhanded, universal benefit that does not involve NSF in
 choosing among competing networks.  By increasing the value of
 belonging to a regional network, the backbone offers all attached
 networks a continuing annual subsidy commensurate with their size.
 Increased value can also derived from access to complementary
 resources -- supercomputer cycles, databases, electronic newsletters,
 special instruments, etc. -- over the network.  Like direct funding
 of backbone, funding these resources would induce more institutions
 to join regional networks and to upgrade their connections.  For
 example, where a database already exists, mounting it on the network
 can be a very cost-effective investment, increasing the value of the
 network as well as directly benefiting the users of the database.
 Commercial information services (e.g., Dialog, Orbit, Lexis) may
 serve this function well since they represents resources already
 available without any public investment.  Marketing commercial
 services to universities over the Internet is permissible in that it
 supports academic research and education (although the guidelines
 state that such commercial uses "should be reviewed on a case-by-case
 basis" by NSF).
 But to date there has been remarkably little use of the regional
 networks, let alone the NSFNET backbone, to deliver commercial
 information services.  In part, this is because the commercial
 services are unaware of the opportunities or unsure how to market in
 this environment and are concerned about losing control of their
 product.  It is also due to uneasiness within the regional networks
 about usage policies and reluctance to compete directly with public
 packet-switched networks.  However, for weak regional networks, it

Kahin [Page 8] RFC 1192 Commercialization of the Internet November 1990

 may be necessary to involve commercial services in order to attract
 and hold sufficient membership -- at least if NSF subsidies are
 withdrawn.  Without a critical mass of users, commercialization may
 need to precede privatization.

Impact of Removing NSF Subsidy from the Backbone

 Any shift to a less direct form of subsidy may cause some disocation
 and distress at the regional network level -- until the benefits
 begin to be felt.  No regional network has yet folded, and no
 institution has permanently dropped its connection to a regional
 network as a consequence of higher prices, but concerns about the
 viability of some regionals would suggest that any withdrawal of
 subsidy proceed in phases.
 Moreover, as the NSF subsidy vanishes, the operation of the backbone
 becomes a private concern of Merit, the Michigan Strategic Fund, IBM,
 and MCI.  While Merit and the Michigan Strategic Fund are more or
 less public enterprises within the state, they are essentially
 private entrepreneurs in the national operation of a backbone
 network.  Without NSF's imprimatur and the leveraging federal funds,
 the remaining parties are much less likely to treat the backbone as a
 charity offering and may well look to recovering costs and using
 revenues to expand service.
 The backbone operation could conceivably become either a nonprofit or
 for-profit utility.  While nonprofit status might be more appealing
 to the academic networking community now served by the backbone, it
 is not readily apparent how a broadly representative nonprofit
 corporation, or even a cooperative, could be constituted in a form
 its many heterogeneous users would embrace.  A non-profit
 organization may also have difficulty financing rapid expansion of
 services.  At the same time, the fact that it will compete with
 private suppliers may preclude recognition as a tax-exempt
 organization -- and so its ability to reinvest retained earnings.
 Operation of the backbone on a for-profit basis would attract private
 investment and could be conducted with relative efficiency.  However,
 given the dominant position of the backbone, a for-profit operation
 could conceivably get entangled in complex antitrust, regulatory, and
 political struggles.  A nonprofit organization is not immune from
 such risks, but to the extent its users are represented in policy-
 making, tensions are more likely to get expressed and resolved
 internally.
 The status of backbone or regional networks within the Internet is
 entirely separate from the question of whether network services are
 metered and charged on a usage basis.  Confusion in this regard stems

Kahin [Page 9] RFC 1192 Commercialization of the Internet November 1990

 from the fact that the low-speed public data networks (SprintNet,
 TymNet), which are sometimes seen as competitive to Internet
 services, do bill on a connect-time basis.  However, these commercial
 services use X.25 connection-based packet-switching -- rather than
 the connectionless (datagram) TCP/IP packet-switching used on the
 Internet.  Internet services could conceivably be billed on per-
 packet basis, but the accounting overhead would be high and packets
 do not contain information about individual users.  At bottom, this
 is a marketing issue, and there is no evidence of any market for
 metered services -- except possibly among very small users.  The
 private suppliers, Alternet and PSI, both sell "pipes" not packets.

Privatization by Function

 As an alternative approach to encouraging privatization, Dr.  Wolff
 suggested barring mature services such as electronic mail from the
 subsidized network.  In particular, NSF could bar the mail and news
 protocols, SMTP and NNTP, from the backbone and thereby encourage
 private providers to offer a national mail backbone connecting the
 regional networks.  Implementation would not be trivial, but it would
 arguably help move the academic and research community toward the
 improved functionality of X.400 standards.  It would also reduce
 traffic over the backbone by about 30% -- although given continued
 growth in traffic, this would only buy two months of time.
 If mail were moved off the regional networks as well as off the
 NSFNET backbone, this would relieve the more critical congestion
 problem within certain regions.  But logistically, it would be more
 complicated since it would require diverting mail at perhaps a
 thousand institutional nodes rather than at one or two dozen regional
 nodes.  Politically, it would be difficult because NSF has
 traditionally recognized the autonomy of the regional networks it has
 funded, and the networks have been free to adopt their own usage
 guidelines.  And it would hurt the regional networks financially,
 especially the marginal networks most in need of NSF subsidies.
 Economies of scale are critical at the regional level, and the loss
 of mail would cause the networks to lose present and potential
 members.

The National Research and Education Network

 The initiative for a National Research and Education Network (NREN)
 raises a broader set of policy issues because of the potentially much
 larger set of users and diverse expectations concerning the scope and
 purpose of the NREN.  The decision to restyle what was originally
 described as a National Research Network to include education was an
 important political and strategic step.  However, this move to a
 broader purpose and constituency has made it all the more difficult

Kahin [Page 10] RFC 1192 Commercialization of the Internet November 1990

 to limit the community of potential users -- and, by extension, the
 market for commercial services.  At the regional, and especially the
 state level, public networking initiatives may already encompass
 economic development, education at all levels, medical and public
 health services, and public libraries.
 The high bandwidth envisioned for the NREN suggests a growing
 distance between resource-intensive high-end uses and wide use of
 low-bandwidth services at low fixed prices.  The different demands
 placed on network resources by different kinds of services will
 likely lead to more sophisticated pricing structures, including
 usage-based pricing for production-quality high-bandwidth services.
 The need to relate such prices to costs incurred will in turn
 facilitate comparison and interconnection with services provided by
 commercial vendors.  This will happen first within and among
 metropolitan areas where diverse user needs, such as
 videoconferencing and medical imaging, combine to support the
 development of such services.
 As shown in Figures 1. and 2., the broadening of scope corresponds to
 a similar generalization of structure.  The path begins with
 mission-specific research activity organized within a single
 computer.  It ends with the development of a national or
 international infrastructure: a ubiquitous, orderly communications
 system that reflects and addresses all social needs and market
 demand, without being subject to artificial limitations on purpose or
 connection.  There is naturally tension between retaining the
 benefits of specialization and exclusivity and seeking the benefits
 of resource-sharing and economies of scale and scope.  But the
 development and growth of distributed computing and network
 technologies encourage fundamental structures to multiply and evolve
 as components of a generalized, heterogeneous infrastructure.  And
 the vision driving the NREN is the aggregation and maturing of a
 seamless market for specialized information and computing resources
 in a common, negotiable environment.  These resources have costs
 which are far greater than the NREN.  But the NREN can minimize the
 costs of access and spread the costs of creation across the widest
 universe of users.

Kahin [Page 11] RFC 1192 Commercialization of the Internet November 1990

Figure 1. Generalization of Purpose:

 Discipline-Specific Research            CSNET, HEPnet, MFEnet
 General Research                        early NSFNET, "NRN"
 Research and Education                  BITNET, present NSFNET,
                                         early "NREN"
 Quasi-Public                            many regional networks,
                                         "NREN"
 National Infrastructure                 "commercialized NREN"
 _______________________________________________________________

Figure 2. Generalization of Structure:

 Computer                                time-sharing hosts
 Network                                 early ARPANET
 Internetwork                            ESNET, NSFNET (tiered)
 Multiple Internetworks                  present Internet
 Infrastructure                          "NREN"

Workshop Participants

 Rick Adams, UUNET
 Eric Aupperle, Merit
 Stanley Besen, RAND Corporation
 Lewis Branscomb, Harvard University
 Yale Braunstein, University of California, Berkeley
 Charles Brownstein, National Science Foundation
 Deborah Estrin, University of Southern California
 David Farber, University of Pennsylvania
 Darleen Fisher, National Science Foundation
 Thomas Fletcher, Harvard University
 Kenneth Flamm, Brookings Institution
 Lisa Heinz, U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment
 Fred Howlett, AT&T
 Brian Kahin, Harvard University
 Robert Kahn, Corporation for National Research Initiatives
 Kenneth King, EDUCOM

Kahin [Page 12] RFC 1192 Commercialization of the Internet November 1990

 Kenneth Klingenstein, University of Colorado
 Joel Maloff, CICNet
 Bruce McConnell, Office of Management and Budget
 Jerry Mechling, Harvard University
 James Michalko, Research Libraries Group
 Elizabeth Miller, U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment
 Eli Noam, New York State Public Service Commission
 Eric Nussbaum, Bellcore
 Peter O'Neil, Digital Equipment Corporation
 Robert Powers, MCI
 Charla Rath, National Telecommunications and Information
              Administration, Department of Commerce
 Ira Richer, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
 William Schrader, Performance Systems International
 Howard Webber, Digital Equipment Corporation
 Allan Weis, IBM
 Stephen Wolff, National Science Foundation

Security Considerations

 Security issues are not discussed in this memo.

Author's Address

 Brian Kahin
 Director, Information Infrastructure Project
 Science, Technology & Public Program
 John F. Kennedy School of Government
 Harvard University
 Phone:  617-495-8903
 EMail:  kahin@hulaw.harvard.edu

Kahin [Page 13]

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