/nren/net92.boucher.txt 25 March 1992 ADDRESS BY CONGRESSMAN BOUCHER AT NET '92 The following are remarks presented by U.S. Congressman Frederick C. Boucher (D-VA) before the National Net '92 Conference on March 25, 1992. Congressman Boucher is the chairman of the Science Subcommittee of the House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Science, which has primary oversight responsibility over the National Science Foundation. He also is a member of the House Judiciary and Energy and Commerce Committees. Mr. Boucher: Thank you very much. It's a genuine pleasure to join you here this morning. Before I turn to my prepared remarks, I thought I would spend a couple of moments to tell you about something that happened earlier this week when I gave my last speech. I was seated down in front of the speaker's podium with a very nice lady whom I had not met before. She had been to several of the occasions where I'd given talks before and she said, "Rick, I'm glad you are going to be our speaker today because I've heard you speak before and you do very well." She said, "As a matter of fact, each of the speeches you give is a little better than the next." I didn't know quite how to respond to that, so I thought for a minute and I said to her, "It may please you to know my speeches will be collected and published posthumously." And with that her eyes got big and round and she said, "I think that's terrific and I think the sooner the better." Bob was kind enough to mention when he gave his introduction that the congressional district I represent in Virginia is known as the Fightin' 9th and that description comes from what has been a very partisan history. As Bob well knows, the Democrats and Republicans in my district are contentious and they participate in virtually every election and they do it with a passion. That is a history that runs back about 150 years in southwest Virginia. There's one county where the politics run so deep that it is probably more important to be affiliated with a political party than it is with a church, for example. I am told -- and I don't know this for a fact -- but I have been told by a number of reliable sources that there are only two funeral homes in that part of the county -- one of them is Democrat and the other is Republican -- and you wouldn't dare be seen in the wrong one on the final day. That's the kind of district I represent. Bob, it's a pleasure to be here today and I thank you and the others who have made this invitation possible. I think it is in part fitting, since you have through your organization, in part for the purpose of promoting the advance of networking technologies in the United states, that you have such a large gathering here for your fifth annual meeting in the wake of the passage by the Congress of the High Performance Computing Initiative authorizing as it does, the National Research and Education Network. I know that many in this audience today have made major contributions to the development of this legislation that has been signed into law. I also want to acknowledge the efforts of EDUCOM, the organizer of the forum in helping to define that vision of the network for the United States for the future. The High Performance Computing Act enjoyed broad support in the Congress because it was recognized as advancing technologies that are necessary to the future well-being of the nation. The High Performance Computing Program, which is established, evolved from a planning process that was initiated by the technology community itself. Scientists and engineers from government and industrial labs, as well as universities, realized that the time had arrived for major advances to occur both in computing and in networking technologies. And for that realization and for pointing the way for the Congress, the country as a whole owes to you who collaborated in that effort, a debt of gratitude and its profound appreciation. No aspect of the High Performance Computing Program contains greater promise than does the National Network aspect. The NREN will provide a new structure for the conduct of research. Scientists in the future will be as close as their computers to collaboration with colleagues around the nation, to access to remote data bases, or libraries and to the use of specialized scientific facilities and instrumentations. But beyond scientific and technical applications, the NREN is a major step on the road to the future information infrastructure of the nation. That future ubiquitous network for voice, video, and data communications of all kinds will connect homes and schools and workplaces throughout the nation. It will constitute an essential ingredient for our future economic competitiveness and will open new worlds of information and services for all of our citizens. The NREN,with its new generation of switches and software capable of routing information traveling at gigabit speeds, will help to form the backbone of the network -- the interstate highways, if you will, of the information age. But critical to the success of that network will be developing not just the highways but the exit ramps and the access roads that will carry that information to the homes and the businesses and research laboratories where the users will be situated. And for that an entirely different legislative approach will be required. Reference was made to that in the introduction and let me elaborate a bit on what we have in mind. The Japanese have made a commitment and that commitment is that by the year 2015 they will deploy throughout the nation of Japan fiberoptic cables into every home and business, school, and research laboratory in that country. And they have set aside the finances necessary in order to accomplish that fiberoptic deployment. We call that "Deployment over the last mile," meaning the distance from the telephone companies last switch into the residence or business of the end user and that is the most expensive part of network deployment. It is vastly by far the greatest distance of deployment when all those various segments are added together and it's the most costly. I am proposing we do it in the United States not by spending public dollars as we have when developing the NREN, but by giving the private sector sufficient incentive to deploy that network on its own. We're debating in the Congress today some major revisions in the Cable Communications Act of 1984. That was legislation that broadly deregulated the cable television industry. The legislation basically said that no level of government had the authority to set cable rates. It also contained some prohibitions which prevented some logical competitors from getting into that business. Those prohibitions are known as the cross-ownership restrictions of the 19484 Cable Act that say that no telephone company may offer cable service within its telephone service area and that no broadcaster may offer cable service within its broadcast service area. So the most logical competitors for the cable industry are barred by law from getting involved in the business in competition with the dominant cable provider. Now, as a consequence of that, the industry not only is unregulated but it operates as a monopoly throughout the country. I would suggest that unregulated monopoly flies in the face of the American economic experience. We traditionally have sanctioned monopolies in those instances where there were economies of scale that required a single provider of service. Electric utilities and telephone companies have been classic examples of that but even at those industries today we're seeing competition intrude. Independent power producers are generating electricity and selling that to investor-owned utilities and cable companies -- believe it or not they are beginning to offer telephone service in some localities across the country. And yet we have this unnatural monopoly which is protected and guaranteed by federal law and to make it worse, it's not even subject to rate regulation. I think the time has come to break up that monopoly. The time has come when we have to give the telephone industry a fair opportunity to compete and to offer cable television service. Now as a sideline, let me mention there are some consumer benefits that would flow from lower cable television rates, better television service -- I have constituents who say every time it rains, their cable television service goes out. And they say often times it doesn't come back on until it rains again. They call the cable company and no one answers. It takes days to get the repairs made. Consumers are complaining about the lack of programming alternatives. I think if you had real competition, there would be a virtual explosion of programming with the effect that the number and quality of programs on all of the packages available in the market would be superior to what you have on the market today. This is a way to get cable service out into rural America. So there are a number of consumer benefits that would flow from passing that measure. But the major benefit the country would receive is that the telephone companies would then have the incentive to deploy fiberoptics technology over that last mile and get fiber optic cables extending into homes and businesses and research laboratories and schools all throughout the country within a very short period of time. How soon would it happen? In testifying on this bill about a year and a half ago, BellAtlantic, one of the more forward-looking of the telephone companies in the U.S., indicated that if all they could provide over the telephone line was Plain Old Telephone Service, or POTS, it would probably take 40 years to get fiber optics deployed over the last mile universally within the United States. But if they had the power to offer cable T.V. service, they could accomplish that service in about half that time, or 20 years. Now, 20 years from today would allow us to beat the Japanese by about 5 years. We could get fiberoptics deployed to research laboratories, homes, and businesses throughout the country by about the year 2010 and that would give businesses in the United States access to high speed data transmission capabilities at gigabit speed before it happens in Japan. That would be very important for us to do and we could do it without spending a penny of public money simply by taking the breaks off the telephone industry today. So I'm a strong advocate of doing that and we are working daily in the Congress to get that accomplished. I might point out an interesting development that is taking place in my congressional district -- Bob is aware of this, because he initiated this project and is managing the project at this time. What Bob and his colleagues at Virginia Tech have constructed is a partnership that involves the university, the town of Blacksburg, where the university is located, and C&P Telephone, which is a subsidiary of BellAtlantic. This partnership has been formed to conduct a very broad feasibility study to determine the potential for creating in the town of Blacksburg what is known as an electronic village. Fiberoptic technology would be expanded throughout the community, state of the art information services developed at the university, through its software development department would be provided throughout the community. Now I think Blacksburg lends itself to that kind of development because it's a small contained community with the university at its core. The university was one of the first in the country to have fiberoptics deployed throughout its campus. That took place during the decade of the 1980s. It's also because it is small and compact and centered around the university, a very computer literate community. There is a ready audience there to utilize these information services delivered across telephone company lines to personal computers in the home. I think that's an excellent beginning and it may serve as a model for the information community of the 21st century. I would hope to see within a period of just several years, additional communities in the United States embarking on that kind of effort. None of this, however, ultimately will succeed unless the private sector accomplishes that deployment of lines into homes and businesses and that will only take place once the financial incentive for it exists. So even with these promising projects, we come back to the basic necessity of having to pass that kind of legislation and we are having to do that. The title of my talk this morning is, "The Challenge of Transition" and having recently chaired a subcommittee hearing on the management on the current NSFNET as operated by the National Science Foundation, I think that the title is particularly appropriate in terms of characterizing the journey on which we are about to embark in transitioning from the Internet and the NSFNET being the government's role in that to the National Research and Education Network. The hearing that we conducted two weeks ago was the first in a series that we planned to oversee the implementation of the National Research and Education Network commands of the legislation passed last year. We started by reviewing the administration of the NSFNET because these current practices on the part of the National Science Foundation will strongly influence the evolution to the National Research and Education Network. The hearing highlighted the very real accomplishments of the Federal investment in the NSFNET to date. I think it's worthy to mention just several of these. During the past five years, the NSFNET has advanced from serving just a few supercomputer centers in a very narrow research mission to serving millions of scholars and researchers in scores of industrial labs and in most universities and federal labs across the United States. It also connects thousands of high schools and hundreds of American libraries. Traffic on the NSFNET is growing at the astounding rate of 11 percent per month, and that trend has been in existence now for the past year. The hearing also revealed that the federal investment has leveraged by a factor of some 30 to 1 the investments by states, industries, and universities in developing the network infrastructure. And if there's an example of the federal government by its example encouraging investments by the private sector and the educational community this, perhaps, is the single best one. One issue that we addressed in the course of this hearing is the treatment of commercial network providers who use the NSFNET. There's now a very lively competition in the marketplace in the private sector in this provision of network connections. In view of that new environment, the NSFNET is proposing to rebid the agreement for support of the network backbone by offering multiple awards as distinct from the single award which has been offered and provided by the NSF to the present time. That approach by the NSF does not satisfy all the potential offerers of backbone services but it appears to have been developed in consultation with the commercial network providers and the regional networks and would allow for open competition for the new awards. The NSF will very shortly be soliciting comments on this proposal and I would encourage each of you who are interested to forward those comments to the NSF and please send a copy of your recommendation to our subcommittee as well, because we will be very interested in receiving your views. Some of the commercial providers believe the time has come to distribute federal funds for support of the backbone either directly to the regional networks or directly to the users. Backbone services could then be provided entirely by the private sector, competition would ensure the lowest prices and the best service. Other network providers and users think this approach is somewhat premature since allocation of resources to users would be potentially administratively complex and that maintenance of access to the network by relatively poor and resource scarce users would be difficult to achieve. In fact, the regional networks did not support a proposal from the NSF to replace the current agreement for backbone services with direct funding to the regionals. NSF made that proposal and the regionals have said it's too soon for that to occur. Another concern that was raised about removing the federal subsidy to the NSFNET backbone was the possible balkanization or loss in overall connectivity of the network if separate backbone networks evolve with no central authority to impose interconnection standards. Another concern was that premature withdrawal of direct federal support for the backbone could impede application of leading edge technology to the network. There was some concern that if we withdrew that support, appropriate R&D that would lead to new network technology would not take place. I think an interesting question to be raised is that, given the major investments now being made in NREN research, do we still need that R&D component in the NSFNET itself? A question which has, as of yet, not been answered. A second set of issues that were raised at the hearing was whether controls should continue to be imposed on the nature of the traffic that is allowed on the network. Some witnesses characterize the NSF policy of acceptable use on the network as hindering the development of appropriate information services and unnecessarily restraining the volume of network traffic. NSF stated that, in its lawyer's opinion, it had no choice but to enforce an Acceptable Use Policy distinguishing as it does between commercial traffic on the one hand and purely non-profit research and education traffic on the other because its statutory foundation requires that kind of policy be kept in place. Most of the witnesses suggested that some revision of the acceptable use of policy is necessary. They had different reasons for making that recommendation but virtually all of witnesses agreed that modernization and update is in fact required. And the NSF expressed some considerable skepticism about whether it could accomplish a broad range of reform given the mandates of the statute. For that reason, our subcommittee took legislative action last week to modify the statute that governs NSF activities by saying that the Acceptable Use Policy shall not be required. The effect will be to give the NSF very broad authority to determine as it sees fit the best governance of the NSFNET from this time forward. We haven't passed it yet; it has been approved in the subcommittee but we are working now to have that measure attached to whatever other bills working their way through the Congress are necessary in order to have that signed in the near future. The last issue that was raised in the hearing addresses management of the National Research and Education Network. Let me say this is very preliminary because there are more questions than answers at the present time about how this management structure will evolve. Concerns have been raised and were raised at the hearing that interagency coordination through the auspices of the Office of Science and Technology policy is inadequate to insure steady progress toward the NREN. Management of the NREN brings complexity with no good models. The constituencies that need to be represented in the governance of the network include higher education, federal agencies, industries, states, and communities. The structure that can best provide that management is not readily apparent. And again your suggestions and recommendations as we ask that set of questions will be extremely helpful. It was evident to the subcommittee that there were more questions than answers about the best way to achieve a transition to the National Research and Education Network. In crafting the High Performance and Computing Act, Congress provided broad authority and a general template for the High Performance Computing Program. The legislation left open vast numbers of details for the implementation of the program with the expectation that these questions would be addressed by the agencies that are charged with carrying it out. Now, we didn't leave it entirely to the agencies to do this singlehandedly; we required in the statute that within one year of passage of the Act, OSTP must report to the Congress on topics related to the establishment of the NREN. Among the items that must be addressed in the report, are possible funding mechanisms for operation of the network and procedures for providing commercial services over the network. And also to be discussed are the means of protecting copyrighted materials distributed over NREN and assuring the privacy of users. The network can't grow without these policies and protections being put into place. Congress fully expects the Administration will give careful consideration to preparation of this report over the course of the coming year. Frankly, we're expecting more than short bureaucratic answers to these questions we have posed. Our subcommittee is going to be particularly active in evaluating that report, questioning the witnesses who prepared it, and examining carefully the thoughtful process that has been applied to coming forward with these answers and recommendations. That report should be developed in a very broad consultative process as was the case in the development of the original report recommending the program some five years ago. In developing the detailed plan for transition to the NREN, I think a few basic principles must be observed. First, the benefits of this network should flow to the nation broadly and not just to a narrow few. The developments of markets and the involvement of industry on a level playing field is essential for the diffusion of network services throughout the nation. We've got to be fair. We have to make sure commercial access is assured and that it is done on fair terms -- that development of the technology and management of the NREN should push the limits necessary to stimulate and meet the demand for services while ensuring reliability and stability to the users who will become dependent upon the network. And finally, the many communities that participate in the development and use of the NREN must have a voice in planning for the network and for its long-term management. And that means you, and we, will depend upon your advice and guidance as this process goes forward. In closing, I would like to remind this audience that whatever has been accomplished to date in building the Internet has been a collaborative process among government, universities, and industry. The further evolution of the network will require an intensification of that same collaborative process involving all of those various groups. The NREN will not be a federal network, it will not be a research network, nor will it be an industrial and commercial network; it will be all of these things. For it to function effectively, an extraordinary balance of these competing interests and objectives will be required. Your support will be required if success is to be achieved in that collaborative undertaking. National Net, I think, provides an excellent forum for that process. I encourage you to make your views known to the Subcommittee, to the Administration, and to others who are involved in this process on behalf of government as we strive to put in place the world's most modern information network. Thank you.