THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 5, 1996 TAG: 9602030225
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Commentary
SOURCE: BY ROGER A. GRIMES, SPECIAL TO BUSINESS WEEKLY
LENGTH: Long : 102 lines
Swords were raised and lines drawn when ComNet 96, one of the world's largest computer network conferences, opened in Washington last week.
Most of the keynote speakers and attendees had one thing to say to Capital Hill: ``Stay out of our way and off the Internet.'' What else could you expect in a politician's town other than politics?
Each year, ComNet showcases the latest advances in corporate computer networking and communications, but much of the show was stolen by discussions about the Internet.
Of course, there were the usual grandiose predictions of things that will change the way we live. Nicholas Negroponte, director of MIT's Media Laboratory and author of the best seller, Being Digital, discussed research that will allow the human body to act as a conduit to transmit large amounts of data between various small digital devices that a person might wear.
``You can actually transmit 100,000 bits per second of information through the human body,'' Negroponte said. ``That means your sneaker computer can communicate with your wrist watch and computer. If I shake your hand, we can exchange information. In 10 years, at this particular conference, you can go around the room shaking everyone's hand and at night go home and print off everyone's calling card from your shoe. Just don't sneeze on your hand.''
Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the most popular network standard in the world (called ethernet) and founder of the corporate computer network giant, 3Com, startled the conference with the prediction: ``The Internet will suffer multiple, catastrophic collapses this year. They won't be permanent. . . but I see that they are inevitable.''
He based the crash on several events he predicted: too much Internet traffic, security break-ins, and corporate America's inability to measure the effectiveness of Internet advertising.
To shore up his argument of the ever-increasing traffic overpowering the current capabilities of the Internet, Metcalfe asked audience participants to raise their hand if they were frustrated by the slowness of the Internet. Out of hundreds of conference goers, who were mostly computer professionals, not one hand remained down.
Most messages coming out of ComNet were directed at the current legislative attempts to govern the Internet. In a burst of recent congressional action designed to tame its frantic growth, laws have been proposed (and passed) seeking to limit the electronic community.
Negroponte argued that most lawmakers do not know how to correctly regulate something that has no physical boundaries. ``Most of the people running this country and major companies are the digital homeless and are retarding the American economy,'' he said. ``They are making these stupid laws such as the Exon bill and against the export of encryption, stopping all the things they don't understand.''
Most of the current governmental regulation activity is targeted toward the Internet issues of censorship, privacy and telephone deregulation. The Communications Decency Act of 1995, proposed by Sen. J. James Exon, D-Neb., last year, seeks to make all telecommunications service providers liable for every message, file, and all content carried on their network. It was proposed in a clumsy effort to erase all pornography, and things deemed indecent, from the Internet and other network services, such as American Online.
However, the measure would contradict the Constitution. And it would be impossible to prevent indecent material from filtering into clean networks because the Internet receives traffic from all over the world.
And even though no service provider could economically prevent such occurrences, the Exon bill proposes fines up to $100,000 and/or up to 2 years in jail for service providers transmitting information which they had no control over.
``How do you determine standards of decency for a community that spans the whole world?,'' Negroponte asked, pointing to the examples of a foreign country's request last year for the United States to extradite Madonna and Michael Jackson for violating their country's religious standards.
With computers around the world learning information each time we use our credit cards or join a club, privacy is a rising concern of many information highway users.
Encryption can protect privacy, but the federal government wants the ability to read any message it desires. To limit foreign drug dealing and terrorist activities, the government will not allow any U.S. company to export strong encryption products.
Netscape, an Internet corporation with the largest first-year revenues ($80.7 million) of any software company to date, is having difficulty getting world-wide acceptance of its software. Many foreign countries refuse to use the ``crippled'' copies with weak encryption to conduct the commercial transactions that are so vital to the survival of the Internet.
In the conference's only heavily divided issue, many speakers spoke with support, and fear, of the congressional passage of the long-awaited Telecommunications Act. The law is intended to remove impediments to competition in local telephone monopoly markets. It should lower phone rates and allow a slew of new technology to reach the consumer. Not everyone agrees.
Some see the passage of the amended bill as a fractured version derived by telephone company lobbyists to prevent the large scale deregulation. Suspicions ran high because the new law is supported by most of the very monopolies it is intended to break up.
``It appears that the remaining strong monopolies are dodging the bullet this year.'' Metcalfe said.``The Telecomm Act, therefore, will not introduce the competition needed to provide the infrastructure investments required to support the continued healthy expansion of the Internet.'' by CNB