https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3953-8919
ABSTRACT
The period from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s saw the transformation of information and communication infrastructure. In the same period, TPRC evolved from a narrower focus on conventional telecommunications and information policy to “The Research Conference on Communications, Information, and Internet Policy.” Through the lens of my own interdisciplinary work on Internet policy and intersecting TPRC activity, this retrospective describes an arc of change that began at the 1994 TPRC and continued for about a decade. It combines description, commentary, and reflections on what this history might bode for TPRC as metaverses and Web3 progress from today’s hype to tomorrow’s Internet.
Today’s “Annual Research Conference on Communications, Information, and Internet Policy” grew into that characterization between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s. Broadening from TPRC’s roots in conventional telecommunications might have been inevitable, but when and how were not. I had a hand in midwifing that process. That experience was anchored by my role in building and running the Computer Science and Telecommunication Board (CSTB) at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. CSTB pioneered in the arena of Internet policy, work that motivated my original connection to the then Telecommunications Policy Research Conference.1 This retrospective draws from my experience as a participant–observer in this evolution, complemented by a review of TPRC agendas from the interval 1992 to 1996. It focuses on the role of the Internet, per se, at the Conference; associated changes in the treatment of information policy and competition policy are only touched on in passing.
The 1992 TPRC would have looked familiar to the conference founders, many of whom continued to participate through at least the 1990s. It focused on conventional telecommunications modalities—wireline and wireless, telephony, and television. Some attention was paid to technology change and service integration within those modalities (e.g., “personal communications services” [PCS] in wireless). The 1992 conference addressed core telecommunications regulation and policy issues at the federal and state levels, with some consideration of international trends and issues. Its content pillars included access (equity), industry structure and conduct (concentration, competition, and pricing), spectrum management, and associated information policy issues—speech (emphasizing the role of media as gatekeepers), and intellectual property. The papers addressed fax, videotex, and electronic data interchange (EDI), the latter reflecting the dominance of private networks in data communications. Although not yet commercial, the Internet did have a small presence in a discussion panel, “Internet Backbone and Exchange Service: Access and Pricing Issues,” and a paper, “Network Management Standards and the Role of the Internet Engineering Task Force.” More typical were papers with such titles as “Natural Monopoly in the Telephone Industry” and “The Effects of Cable Television Deregulation on Prices and Welfare” presented by regulatory economists from consultancies and such telephony-oriented entities as Bellcore, GTE Laboratories, and Southwestern Bell.
1994 as a Pivotal Year
The pattern visible in 1992 continued through the 1994 conference, when a substantial transformation began. Illustrative of more traditional panels were “The Economics of Integrated Broadband Networks” (e.g., “Pricing of Integrated Digital Telephone and Cable TV Services” paper), “The Effects of Recent Regulatory Changes on the Cable Television Industry” (e.g., “Vertical Integration, Program Access, and the 1992 Cable Television Act” paper), “Interconnection of Telephone Networks” panel (e.g., “Historical Perspectives on Interconnection Between Competing Local Exchange Companies” paper), and “Alternative Regulatory Regimes in Theory and Practice” (e.g., “Dynamic Effects of Price Cap and Rate of Return Regulation on Exchange Carrier Incentives” paper). Nevertheless, two panels—“The Economics of Internet” and “Electronic Commerce”—addressed the rise of the Internet, demonstrating nimbleness given the typical lags of research and writing.
The 1993 inauguration of the Clinton/Gore2 administration proved catalytic, since it launched the National (soon Global) Information Infrastructure (NII/GII) Initiative. The NII Initiative engaged issues that were integral to TPRC, exploring and advancing issues associated with conventional telecommunications modalities in connection with the Internet. A vision statement was presented in the September 1993 NII Agenda for Action.3 Progress toward its implementation was fostered by the federal interagency Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF) and its associated working groups. These bodies worked on numerous practical and policy issues relating to the benefits (e.g., for health and education) and risks (e.g., for privacy and security) of information infrastructure, along with issues ranging from electronic (or e-) commerce to intellectual property (guaranteed to be controversial, given both commercial and “public interest” concerns, the emphasis on copyright, and the inherent challenge of discerning policy options with still immature digital technologies4).
“Information infrastructure” is a broad and flexible concept. When CSTB was constituted in 1986, it drew on its members’ familiarity with the early Internet to identify information infrastructure as an opportunity and imperative, which it framed in a 1988 report.5 The association of information infrastructure and NII/GII specifically with the Internet was cemented by the commercialization of the Internet backbone in 1994–1995.6 That step—while not as portentous as the 1984 AT&T divestiture,7 which stimulated growth in commercial data communications services—opened up business opportunities, further innovation, and the kinds of policy debates and drama that continue to occupy TPRC.
Also in 1994, CSTB published Realizing the Information Future,8 which addressed the NII Agenda for Action and its implementation. This landmark book explained why, from a technology perspective, the Internet—which was not the property of any single entity, government, or industry—would come to dominate communications and information infrastructure. It articulated the virtues of an open data network (open to users, service providers, network providers, and change); it showed how such a network transcends the conventional networks that TPRC historically focused on;9 and it spotlit last-mile economics. Realizing also discussed the range of Internet stakeholders, flagging the concerns of the earliest users in research, education, and libraries that they might be crowded out or otherwise at a disadvantage as entertainment, telephony/telecommunications, and cable industry actors took over the supply side and focused on commercial opportunities. Many of those concerns endure, for example, in debates about the digital divide. Members of the study committee and I briefed key officials at the White House, federal agencies, and the IITF, as well as several private sector groups—including individuals who were TPRC regulars—on Realizing, and I presented and discussed it at TPRC that fall (in the “Economics of Internet” panel). The dissemination of Realizing, including at TPRC, helped to educate the TPRC community at large about the what, why, and how of the Internet at that time.10
Experience briefing Realizing and conducting complementary research demonstrated that the Internet was alien to telecommunications lawyers and economists. That recognition inspired me to engineer a special panel at the 1995 TPRC, “Architecture and Economic Policy: Lessons From the Internet,” that was intended to inject new lines of analysis and discussion into the conference.11 As I explained in framing the papers in that panel for their publication in Telecommunications Policy,12 I sought interdisciplinary analyses that connected social scientists with Internet-savvy technology experts to explore both the potential evolution of the Internet and its economic implications, in particular. Among economic issues, Internet pricing attracted the earliest attention, as illustrated by that panel. Because the Internet began as a service that appeared free to its early users, commercialization raised many questions (and, among users, concerns) about pricing, including business models and pricing mode (e.g., based on usage or subscription) and how pricing would militate against the technical problem of congestion in the network. Other economic issues that emerged early and were featured in the panel were payments (settlements) associated with network interconnection and industrial organization, including the interaction of network architecture, pricing, and delivery of content over the network (which might involve different businesses given the layered nature of the architecture).
The 1995 “Architecture and Economic Policy” panel demonstrated that conference process matters, and it can be wielded intentionally. Interdisciplinary discussion was reinforced by the engagement of an economist and a technologist as discussants for the panel. Coming from industry, these discussants were able to bring observations from real systems and businesses on issues from costs to market power into an otherwise conceptual discussion. They helped to connect the fledgling commercial Internet to conventional communications industries. In contrast to typical TPRC panels composed opportunistically from complementary papers, this panel involved both invited participation and advance discussion among participants about how to make the most of their interdisciplinarity and motivate the broader engagement of others. Participants also engaged additional members of the then-TPRC community in reviewing drafts. Papers from the panel were published in the conference proceedings volume as well as the journal, and a technologist participant from this panel who had also been prominent in developing Realizing (and later other CSTB reports discussed below) became a mainstay of the conference, soon formalizing a collaboration with one of the economist participants.13
The 1995 conference also marked the mixed reactions to the NII/GII Initiative via the paper, “A Critique of Federal Telecommunications Policy Initiatives Relating to Universal Service and Open Access to the NII.” It addressed the then-growing connection of cable to the Internet,14 for example, in a “Network Economics and Compatibility Standards” panel,15 a precursor to subsequent TPRC discussions of the evolution of cable modems and set-top boxes.
Deepening TPRC’s Engagement with the Internet
In 1996 there was a bigger Internet footprint at TPRC. Notably, Internet economics were the focus of a tutorial early in the conference, “Economic FAQ about the Internet;”16 the paper “Combining Sender and Receiver Payment Schemes on the Internet” (in a broadly scoped “Network Architecture Implications” panel); and panels on “Pricing the Internet” and “Policy Barriers to Infrastructure Investment.” I presented the sequel to Realizing, called The Unpredictable Certainty,17 in the latter panel via the paper, “Investing Under Conditions of Uncertainty.” Because neither access to nor reaping the benefits of the Internet is automatic, CSTB through Unpredictable focused on the needs and options for associated investment. The choice of title underscored how the Internet’s ascendance was inevitable, but how that would happen—and the roles of and rewards for different players—were uncertain at that time. Once again, discussion at TPRC complemented extensive dissemination; Unpredictable was briefed in government and the private sector. Among those briefed was the first computing- and Internet-savvy technologist18 appointed to a leadership role at the FCC, a man who chaired the 1996 panel, “The Internet: Business and Policy Issues,” contemplating addressing challenges for what would become an enduring TPRC topic, Internet telephony.
The 1996 conference, not surprisingly, had content on the Tele-communications Act of 1996, legislation that endures as a legacy of the immature thinking among policymakers at the time about the Internet.19 Its international coverage notably (in retrospect) included a paper on “The Great (Fire)Wall of China.” TPRC’s evolving attention to online content tended to focus on commercial issues from intellectual property rights to media ownership and market power rather than government control.20
TPRC’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1997 saw a widely cast conference, balancing conventional telecommunications modalities and telecommunications and information policy issues with (some) material on Internet issues. The Internet-oriented papers memorialized in the proceedings volume included a pair on Internet telephony, one on intellectual property rights, and a reflection on a major effort to develop technology to help users manage their privacy online, another issue that continues to vex people as the challenges have grown larger and more complex. Two of these were written by technologists who had become active at the conference.21
The Internet was broadly felt at the 1998 TPRC. The tension between conventional telecommunications—at least the telephony aspects—and the Internet was expressed in the title (and content) of the panel, “Net Heads vs. Bell Heads: Which Paradigm for Telecommunications Will Prevail?”22 and the paper, “The Internet and ‘Telecommunications Services’: Access Charges, Universal Service Mechanisms and Other Flotsam of the Regulatory System” in a “Telecommunications Act” panel. 1998 was the year “convergence” emerged as a term at the conference: a “Convergence: Regulatory Implications” panel was broadly scoped, and other panels addressed the concept while examining the intersections of the Internet with telephony or television (e.g., “The Transition to Digital TV,” and “IP Telephony Engineering Cost Models”).
The 1998 TPRC also opened the door to issues that would be discussed more at subsequent conferences. These include software (a panel focused on “Software Competition”) and cybersecurity, which took a while to take hold at TPRC as a topic (I chaired a panel on “Security and Trustworthiness”). After concern about intellectual property aspects of the use of the Domain Name System (DNS), an element of Internet and Web operation surfaced in a 1998 paper, “Trademarks and Domain Names: Property Rights and Institutional Evolution in Cyberspace,”23 DNS became the basis for sustained attention to “Internet governance,” a term that appalled the Internet technical community when it emerged but resonated with social scientists at TPRC and elsewhere.
The 1999 TPRC advanced the examination of industry change precipitated by the Internet with a panel, “Restructuring Telecom for the New Millennium: Is Bigger Better?” that combined two longtime economists concerned with regulated industries and competition policy24 and two Internet-focused practitioners.25 Other notable panels discussing the evolving nature and role of the Internet included “Evolution of Industry Structure” and, focusing on peering issues, “Internet Interconnection.” The “Internet and Mass Media” panel, including the paper, “Mergers, Divestitures and the Internet: Is Ownership of the Media Industry Becoming Too Concentrated?” pointed to an expansion in the focus of media policy from conventional to online media—at this early stage, a relatively simple transplant of perspectives from old to new. A panel on “Electronic Political Participation” addressed digital democracy involving the Internet for what appears to be the first time,26 while attention to e-commerce continued, with one panel on it explicitly and another on “Regulation and Online Activities.”27 1999 saw the first TPRC panel dedicated to Internet governance, “Institutional Design for Internet Governance.” Finally, 1999 marked the first of what became an annual series of panels on “User Studies” looking at the dynamics of early Internet use and users—in a period when Internet observers fretted about the absence of “killer apps,” understanding the demand side was important if difficult.
Recognizably an Internet Conference in 2000
The Internet was substantially established at TPRC by the 2000 conference. An “International Internet Telephony” panel addressed pricing and regulatory issues, and Internet governance was the obvious focus of the panel, “International Governance: ICANN, the EU, and the Globalization of the Internet Economy.” This conference saw the development of both traditional and newer themes and the translation of traditional policy frameworks to newer technologies. The traditional side is illustrated by the continued effort to transplant conventional media policy to the Internet, with such papers as “Public Service Internet? Public Service Broadcasting and the Internet: An Int’l Comparative Study” and “Should Congress Establish a Compulsory License for Internet Video Providers to Retransmit Over-the-Air TV Station Programming Via the Internet?” Attention to intellectual property issues associated with the Internet grew, as the financial and other stakes became more obvious, and as media policy centered on extending or extrapolating from existing mechanisms. The application of traditional policy perspectives extended to competition policy, as evident in the “Access, Pinch Points, and Antitrust” and the “Regulation of Online Activity” panels. One paper from the latter panel, “A Layered Model for Internet Policy,” illustrated how policy analysts were attempting to leverage new learning about the Internet’s technical architecture to rethink how regulation and other kinds of policy should be structured—this kind of policy analysis also illustrates how hard it is to implement new ideas.28 Layers made a stronger presence at the 2002 conference (see below).
Who uses the Internet and how grew as TPRC themes. The 2000 conference appears to be the first to feature the term “digital divide,” in “Social Issues in Community Adoption of ICTs” papers and the paper, “Community-Centered Initiatives Addressing the Digital Divide: Challenges to Traditional Telecommunications Policy and Governance” presented in a panel on universal service. The 2000 “User Studies” panel continued exploration of the demand side, including a paper on what the then-new Pew Internet and American Life Project29 was learning about “New Internet Users: What They Do Online, What They Don’t, and Implications for the Net’s Future.”30
The 2000 conference also suggested that attention to the details of Internet technology was here to stay, engaging both technologists and others. For example, the relationship between underlying conventional telecommunications infrastructure and Internet service was explored in the panel, “Internet Bandwidth and Spectrum Allocation: Economics and Architecture,” which included a paper looking at different technical approaches to quality of service, then in contention (“Dynamic Bandwidth Provisioning Economy of a Market-Based IP QoS Interconnection: IntServ-DiffServ”) and in the “Infrastructure” panel, which focused on broadband. Another paper in that panel, “Real-time Services and the Fragmentation of the Internet,” pointed to yet other ways that the Internet could evolve—the Internet was proving to be more complex and uncertain than conventional telecommunications.
Perhaps most striking was the embrace by several TPRC participants of a central concept of the Internet’s architecture, the so-called end-to-end (E2E2) principle31 that was popularized in the TPRC community by Realizing. One of the original E2E authors and I contemplated the challenges to E2E as the Internet matured and diffused in the interdisci-plinary paper, “Rethinking the Design of the Internet: The End-to-end Arguments vs. the Brave New World,” which was published in the 2000 proceedings (and elsewhere).32 It was part of a panel entitled “Does Policy Determine Design or Vice Versa?” that also featured the paper, “The Digital Dilemma: A Perspective on Intellectual Property in the Information Age,” presenting the results of a CSTB study33 on that topic. Separately, the panel, “End to End Network Policy” included (along with the paper, “A Common Carrier Approach to Internet Interconnection”) the paper, “The End of End to End: Preserving the Architecture of the Internet in the Broadband Era” by two lawyers who had pioneered in cyberlaw.34 It is notable that the analysis developed without technologists aimed to preserve a technical concept, and the one with a technologist both revisited that technical concept and discussed the value of doing so as circumstances evolved. The “End of End to End” paper was emblematic of a trend at the time for some lawyers and others to fetishize E2E. That trend helped to animate debates about “network neutrality” over the next few years at TPRC (see below) and elsewhere. In retrospect, this situation would have been a good basis for engineering another special interdisciplinary panel, one designed to engage people from different disciplines (at least computer science, law, and economics) and sectors to engage the issues and the disagreements systematically.
Growing Stakes Expand Engagement
The swirl of issues—technical, economic, business, and social—around the Internet was the subject of CSTB’s The Internet’s Coming of Age, which gave rise to a focused panel at the 2001 TPRC. That book made the point (obvious today) that the Internet was not mature at the turn of this century, which presented challenges and opportunities. Although the “Comparative Regulation” and “Value Sensitive Design of Cyberspace” panels spoke to growing tensions within and among countries about policy to guide an evolving Internet, the paper, “Is There a There There? Toward Greater Certainty for Internet Jurisdiction” helped to mark a movement away from late-1990s Internet exceptionalism—a phenomenon35 with comparatively little impact on TPRC.
Bigness in tech looked rather different at the 2001 TPRC than it does today. The “Antitrust and Networks” panel signaled the wariness of some when it comes to size, and industrial organization was addressed in papers on the AOL-Time Warner merger of January 2000 and the United States antitrust case against Microsoft (resolved in 2001 and associated with concern about monopolization of Internet browsers). The 2001 TPRC also continued to explore the role of communities36 in facilitating Internet access, through the “Communities, Cities, and the Internet” panel and elsewhere through the paper, “Digital Arroyos: An Examination of State Policy and Regular Market Boundaries in Constructing Rural Internet Access.”
The “Security in Political and Economic Contexts” panel both demonstrated the continued attention to cybersecurity and anticipated change motivated by 9/11 via the (presumably last-minute) paper, “Security and Freedom Online After September 11.” A “Domain Name Governance” panel featured two papers examining the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN; founded in 1998). Attention to Internet telephony continued, and Internet TV and radio were the topics of one paper each at the “Mass Media” panel, which also covered conventional media.
Internet access and policy issues were covered in the “Regulating the infrastructure” and “Policy Convergence: Open Access and QoS” panels, as well as portions of the panel, “The Future of the Unfettered Internet: Wireless Policy Challenges;” bandwidth, quality of service, and openness of access were jointly explored (in ways very different from the 1992 “Open Network Architecture” discussion concerned with conventional telecommunications). The paper, “National Information Infrastructure Development in Canada and the U.S.: Redefining Universal Access and Universal Service in the Age of Techno-Economic Convergence,” showed the staying power of “NII.”
The 2002 TPRC featured a pair of panels, “Broadband Policy, Deployment, and Uptake in the U.S.” and “Broadband Policy, Deployment, and Uptake in International Markets” that marked the growing spotlight on the quality of Internet access—the digital divide was not only about whether there was access but how good was the access (another enduring issue). Although “broadband” had been discussed earlier in some fashion, whether it was available and how good it was became a test. The U.S.-focused panel featured a paper on and named for another CSTB report, “Broadband: Bringing Home the Bits.”37 That report cautioned against picking a single number to define broadband, since the most meaningful number would vary both over time and by application.38 It also cautioned against wishful thinking about the supply of broadband and the makeup of a “competitive” market, noting that both investment magnitudes and investors’ expectation of getting a return on their investment in broadband connections to homes made having several last-mile competitors in a given community unlikely.39 Economic realities were central to a special panel discussing “A Report Card for the Policy Analysis Community After the Dotcom Bust.”
“Convergence” got its own panel in 2002, spanning conventional telecommunications and the Internet. The potential for approaches focused on layers in the overall information infrastructure, first presented in 2000, returned here via the “Adjusting the Horizontal and Vertical in Telecommunications Regulation: A Comparison of the Traditional and a New Layered Approach” and “Further Defining a Layered Model for Telecommunications Policy” papers. Although conventional telecommunications modalities continued to be covered, the paper, “Telecommunication Basic Research: An Uncertain Future for the Bell Legacy” spoke to the rise of computer science relative to electrical engineering associated with the Internet and the decline of investment by the deregulated and mutating telecommunications industry.40 Finally, peer-to-peer systems, which vexed intellectual property rights holders, got their own panel, “P2P.”
The 2003 TPRC program was strongly Internet-centric, with panels on “Broadband Deployment,” “Broadband Policy,” “Internet Interconnection and Telecom Access,” “Community Networks and the Digital Divide,” “Regulation of Online Activity,” “User Studies,” and “Information Policy,” plus “Telecommunications Act Revisited” and “Spectrum Policy: Unlicensed.” The 2003 “Internet Governance” panel was the most diverse to date, including papers on “Governing E-Commerce—Prospects and Problems” and “The W3C and its Patent Policy Controversy: A Case Study of Authority and Legitimacy in Internet Governance” as well as DNS-related papers. The broadly cast panel, “Security: Natural Experiments and Policies to Motivate Improved Security,” both demonstrated acceptance of cybersecurity as a TPRC topic (which was not the case when I chaired the “Security and Trustworthiness” panel in 1998) and addressed broader notions of Internet dependability and resilience through a paper on a CSTB report with the same name, “The Internet Under Crisis Conditions: Learning From September 11.”41 The CSTB presentation brought a discussant from my 1995 panel back to TPRC—he had instigated the underlying project on behalf of a group of technologists.42
Settling into the Role
Ten years after the commercialization of the Internet backbone, the 2004 TPRC featured some historic perspective in panels on “Internet Pricing and Access” and “Broadband Economics Policy and Diffusion”43 and the paper, “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation.” The entrenchment of Internet telephony was reflected in the panel, “The Effects of [Voice over IP],” which touched on emergency services and CALEA support. The 2004 TPRC also signaled that Internet governance was an enduring concern via a panel that discussed “The New Global Battle on Internet Governance: The World Summit on the Information Society and Beyond.” WSIS,44 with 2003 and 2005 phases, helped the International Telecommunication Union—long involved with traditional telecommunications—make its mark on Internet policy after having been eclipsed by the IETF for several years.45
I will conclude this tour of TPRC’s early embrace of the Internet with the 2005 conference. A highlight of that conference was a panel that I moderated, “Network Neutrality vs. Network Diversity: The Debate Between Open and Proprietary Broadband Architectures.” A climax of TPRC’s attention to net neutrality that panel’s core was a virtual debate between two lawyers with opposing views46 on neutrality.47 Another 2005 panel, “ISPs and Market Structure”—with papers on “The Market Structure of Internet Service Provision” and “The Growth of Internet Overlay Networks: Implications for Architecture, Industry, Structure and Policy”—illustrated how TPRC was tracking the changing nature of Internet service and content delivery. By this point, there was no question that TPRC was centrally although not wholly concerned with the Internet, its evolution, and its implications for policy. Telephony, universal service, spectrum management, mass media, intellectual property, speech, privacy, and other topics—each having an intersection with the Internet but also addressable and addressed at TPRC for conventional modalities—endured.
Reflections on TPRC’s Early Embrace of the Internet and Ideas for the Future
TPRC’s consistent attention to communications technology and policy issues meant that it was only a matter of time before it evolved from a focus on conventional telecommunications to a focus on both the Internet and conventional telecommunications, which coevolved with the Internet. I aided in that process by fostering a kind of symbiosis between the organization that I ran in my day job, CSTB, and TPRC via both the engagement of associated technologists and the discussion of CSTB’s independent, interdisciplinary explorations of the nature of Internet technologies and business models and their policy implications. Those explorations benefited from involving as members of CSTB study committees not only technologists but also social scientists and lawyers, including some active at TPRC. But whereas CSTB study projects involve intense deliberation and argument along with extensive briefings by additional experts over a period of at least a year in most instances (at least during the period covered in this paper), most TPRC participants—scattered across the private sector (universities, companies, and nonprofits) and government—learn more slowly and unevenly about the same topics. Not surprisingly, that reality led to many TPRC papers during the mid-1990s to early 2000s that simply mapped typical TPRC topics to the Internet without demonstrating understanding of associated technologies, their differences from more familiar, conventional ones, and what that might bode for policy and the nature of any mapping. Traditional telecommunications and information policy perspectives were, at first, a hammer for which the Internet was another nail.48
Diminishing that deficit in understanding was another matter of time. New deficits can be expected, however, when it comes to today’s newer technologies, such as the cryptography bases of Web3 or the immersive technologies of metaverses, the many manifestations of artificial intelligence, or others, especially technologies that are hyped and most likely to be imperfectly understood.49 Although a purist can define the Internet narrowly, the fact that it has long been used to apply to the World Wide Web, Internet telephony and television, and other applications that make use of the Internet is a reason to embrace its appeal as a broad label for a dynamic mix of technologies and their uses. Engaging technologists expert in whatever technologies become associated with the Internet will enable TPRC to adapt and play its vital role.
In the chapeau to my 1995 panel,50 I proposed the following areas for future research: (1) “How can the analysis of network and content economics be jointly advanced?” (2) “How can both theoretical . . . and empirical . . . analyses best advance?” (3) “How can technological, business/strategic and economic assessments of the layered information infrastructure be best integrated?” (4) “What is the basis for deciding which among alternative accounting mechanisms is preferable?” That list remains relevant, recognizing that technologies, companies, policies, and more have evolved and continue to evolve. Also enduring is my observation in that chapeau that more and better data are needed to support better analysis of demand and the welfare consequences of alternative strategies and options. The ability to work with massive amounts of data may have grown, but access to the kinds of data TPRC researchers would like remains limited in many instances given their proprietary nature.
Among the topics this retrospective sidestepped given space constraints is how the Internet and associated policy vary among nations. An understanding of how individual countries acquire, use, and experience the Internet has been a low-level TPRC theme, and in my view, it warrants even more attention than might arise organically. WSIS, which took place late in the period covered by this paper, addressed not only Internet governance processes but also divergent international views of the merits of openness. Although openness is a quality cherished by the historic Internet technology community,51 many in civil society, and the TPRC community generally, it is at best a mixed blessing to many governments. Countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia that are becoming more digitalized present opportunities and challenges for the global evolution of the Internet. Now is a time for the TPRC community broadly to learn about the policy contexts and Internet ecosystems of different countries (building on the ad hoc coverage of activity in various countries that has long occurred at TPRC).
Further, tensions between multilateralism and multistakeholderism play out differently in different countries, especially in the Global South, and these should become more prominent at TPRC. Indeed, today there are more ways that fragmentation of the Internet could occur and ways that the Internet is associated with intra–and international tensions not addressed in the early years, which argues for understanding both the possibilities and their implications. TPRC should also rise to the challenge of providing nuanced discussion of China’s role in the evolving Internet. The treatment in the period covered in this paper (a 1999 TPRC featured the paper, “Internet Adoption and Usage in China;” relevant papers were presented in 2000, 2003, and 2005; and a 2004 panel addressed “Telecom Policy Issues Facing China”) might have sufficed for that period, but today’s geopolitically complicated environment demands more. How to prosecute these issues would be the topic of its own paper.
Another topic that warrants more attention is standards, which have their own international dimensions. Attention to the Internet spotlights interoperability (supported by standards) and the nature and role of standards for interfaces and for objects (e.g., files) that might be communicated. More attention to standards would be consistent with the trend toward a broader discussion of technology governance, including soft law, norms, and standards.52 It would also contribute to ongoing consideration of what is and is not open as the Internet and other information infrastructure evolve. Standards also connect to industrial organization issues considered at TPRC, especially as the focus of concerns about big and dominant players shifts. Standards have played a major role in digital technology broadly, from consumer electronics to communications technologies, a circumstance acknowledged in papers in the early part of the period covered in this paper. Standards-setting challenges noted in Realizing53 persist and have evolved (with technologies, industries, and government interests around the world), with contemporary discussions sometimes focusing on geopolitical dimensions.
Standards have received uneven attention at TPRC (panels in 1992 (“Standards and Intellectual Property Rights” and “Standards and Compatibility”), 1994 (“Network Standards Development Organizations and Intellectual Property Rights”), 1995 (“Network Economics and Compatibility Standards”), 1996 (“International Developments in Video Distribution; Cable Telephony and Set Top Box Standards”), 1999 (“Policy and Standards”), 2001–2003 (“Standards”), and a few papers scattered in other kinds of panels). Although the Internet has depended on standards developed differently from those of conventional telecommunications, even its standards-setting processes have changed since the early 1990s in ways that merit continuing attention and analysis. Doing that well might not be easy: One of my all-time favorite TPRC papers was presented in 2002: “Strangers in a Strange Land: Public Interest Advocacy and Internet Standards.” This paper spoke to the practical realities of interdisciplinary collaboration, describing the experience of a nontechnically trained policy-focused lawyer seeking to participate in IETF activities relating to Internet standards-setting—getting in the door was easy, making a difference required the right expertise. Consistent and insightful attention to Internet-related standards at TPRC, along with attention to standards development for wireless54 and other technologies associated with Internet access and use, would benefit from interdisciplinary consideration.
A final observation relates to people. TPRC has long been an intellectual community, with many regulars who sustain its culture and encourage student participation as part of a process of growing the next generation of Internet policy scholars. Some people who participated in TPRC during the period covered in this paper continue to do so; others have moved on intellectually, professionally, or personally. Both continuity and change can keep the community healthy and diverse. When it comes to addressing the Internet, bringing in additional people developing, using, and studying the associated technologies will help to maintain incisive and insightful analysis of Internet economics, law, and policy. Although in TPRC’s earliest years addressing conventional telecommunications economics, law, regulation, and policy issues did not require understanding of associated technologies (although some did), the period covered in this paper demonstrated that computer- and software-based technologies—epitomized by the Internet—differ enough from conventional telecommunications that understanding them matters for associated communications and information policy analysis. Individuals who are knowledgeable about both technology and policy and/or combinations of individuals with both kinds of expertise will continue to be important at TPRC as “the Internet” continues to evolve and present new policy challenges.
FOOTNOTES
Most of the CSTB reports named in this paper became trade books, reaching a large audience. As CSTB’s Executive Director, I chose not to claim credit, but I co-authored and/or substantively edited the works cited here and many more.
Although perhaps properly deemed just the Clinton administration, because Al Gore brought into his vice presidency his engagement with the early Internet and associated research and education networking, the NII/GII Initiative is often associated with him as much as, if not more than, Bill Clinton.
Executive Office of the President.
See, for example, Washington Technology.
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Challenge in Computer Science.
Commercialization of the backbone followed congressional and administration consideration, pressure from industry, and the recognition by research-funding agencies (notably the National Science Foundation, responsible for NSFNET) that it was time for the transition from experimental to production networking. The definitive outline of events as agreed by technologists key to shaping the early Internet can be found on the Internet Society’s website in Leiner et al.
For an idiosyncratic perspective and, more importantly, a timeline, see “AT&T Divestiture.” Note that AT&T played a perhaps unintentional role in the early Internet through research activities and the personal interests of key researchers.
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Realizing the Information Future.
The first chapter is titled, “U.S. Networking: The Past Is Prologue.”
The extensive dissemination effort leveraged the fact that CSTB did not have a vested interest and was able to draw from diverse perspectives on both the key technologies and associated commercial and public interests. White House officials reported in personal communication that they used the book (and its sequel, discussed elsewhere in this paper) internationally to promote the GII.
I was on the program committee for the 1995 conference.
Blumenthal.
David D. Clark of MIT and William H. Lehr, then at Columbia University, respectively.
This, of course, was when browsers emerged to facilitate access to the World Wide Web, which was delivered over—and has often been confused with—the Internet; cable began to provide an alternative to (dial-up) telephony for such access. The first user-friendly browser, Mosaic, was developed at NCSA and commercialized as Netscape, which was established in 1994. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape. Accessed January 1, 2023.
This panel was chaired by the 2022 Program Committee Chair, David Reed, then with CableLabs.
The tutorial was led by Hal Varian. Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Hal Varian had published “Economic FAQs about the Internet” in 1994, following their pioneering explorations beginning at the University of Michigan (Varian and much later MacKie-Mason moved to the University of California at Berkeley). See MacKie-Mason and Varian.
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Unpredictable Certainty.
Mark Corbitt, an Intel veteran, who paved the way for subsequent computing- and Internet-savvy chief technology officers there and at the FCC.
Of course, congressional difficulty understanding the Internet and the technologies that ride over it was not limited to the 1990s, as evidenced by derision a decade later about Senator Ted Stevens’ reference to the Internet as a “series of tubes” and the more recent (late twenty-teens and early twenty-twenties) coverage of questioning of Big Tech executives. Such experiences can help guide the agenda for research and tutorials leveraging the TPRC platform.
That, of course, would change, accelerating in the second decade of this century.
David D. Clark of MIT and Lorrie Faith Cranor, then at AT&T Research and now at Carnegie Mellon University.
In 2001, this tension was echoed in the paper cheekily titled “Revenge of the Bellheads: How the Netheads Lost Control of the Internet.”
That paper was presented by Milton Mueller, then at Syracuse University, who leveraged his attention to DNS issues to create the subfield of Internet governance at TPRC and at his academic homes.
Robert Crandall, Brookings, and Michael Katz, University of California at Berkeley.
Barbara Dooley, Commercial Internet Exchange Association, and Esther Dyson, Edventure Holdings.
In a 1992 panel on “First Amendment Issues in Electronic Media,” there was a paper on “Facsimiles as a ‘Technology of Freedom’.”
Led by a technologist (Marvin Sirbu of Carnegie Mellon University, a long-time TPRC participant), a 1994 “Electronic Commerce” panel addressed topics from electronic brokers to electronic currency, which proved to be enduring topics.
Author Kevin Werbach of the University of Pennsylvania volunteered in a personal communication that the layered, hourglass images from Realizing the Information Future inspired some of his thinking.
Established in 1999 and now integrated into the multifaceted Pew Research Center (accessed January 1, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/), the Pew Internet and American Life Project made an important contribution to Internet scholarship by collecting good survey data and publishing reports on a variety of topics that explored how people thought about, understood, and used (or didn’t use) the Internet.
It was complemented by a device-focused panel that featured the paper, “Taxonomy of Internet Appliances.”
Saltzer et al.
Blumenthal and Clark.
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Digital Dilemma.
Larry Lessig, Harvard Law School, and Mark Lemley, University of California at Berkeley.
The mid-to-late-1990s featured arguments that the Internet is its own, policy-free, or bespoke-policy jurisdiction that were overtaken by the application of pre-existing concepts and policies, some leveraging the fact that routers and other physical evidence of the Internet could, indeed, be associated with a place and a jurisdiction.
Community interest appears to date to 1999.
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Internet under Crisis Conditions.
A target number was again in the news as this paper was written.
These concerns related, in part, to the then-hot issue of unbundling.
CSTB addressed these issues in Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Renewing U.S. Telecommunications Research.
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Internet under Crisis Conditions.
Craig Partridge of BBN Technologies was the chair of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group in Data Communication (SIGCOMM).
It also addressed history for a broader range of technologies in the panel, “Historical Lessons in the ICT Field.”
See: Accessed January 1, 2023, https://www.itu.int/net/wsis/.
Consistent with its connections to the United Nations, WSIS also provided a forum for the concerns of the Global South, a role picked up by the Internet Governance Forum as a WSIS outcome. See: “About the Internet Governance Forum.”
Christopher Yoo, then at Vanderbilt University, and Tim Wu, then at Columbia University. Network neutrality was also advanced in 2005 by a protégé of Larry Lessig, Barbara Van Schewick, Technical University Berlin and Stanford Law School, in the “Towards an Economic Framework for Network Neutrality Regulation” paper in the “Frameworks for Regulation” panel.
The panel also included the perspectives of a longtime telecommunications regulation and policy expert and an Internet technologist, Robert Crandall, Brookings Institution, and David Clark, MIT, respectively.
Many legal and regulatory frameworks can adapt to changing technologies, of course; at issue is how that process is thought through and executed.
Fortunately, the wireless and mobile technologies that increasingly mediate/enable access to the Internet, along with associated policy concerns, have a natural and continuing home at TPRC. For example, 5G wireless is often deemed an enabler of the Internet of Things; the networking of potentially huge numbers of embedded systems has already begun to stimulate additional Internet policy analysis.
Blumenthal.
Realizing argued that the Internet’s open technology would lead it to dominate, but new technology can put new kinds of checks on that.
A paper in the 2002 “Regulation and Code” panel, “Governance Characteristics of ‘Code’: The Role of Transparency, Defaults, and Standards,” has the kind of title that resonates today, given contemporary consideration of governance and transparency being applied to a variety of digital technologies.
Realizing flagged the movement of network function outside of the network, the absence of the kind of recognized mandate associated with early telephony, the intrinsic challenges of both bottom-up and top-down processes, and the potential distortions introduced by commercial forces.
At TPRC, the treatment of standards for wireless and mobile communication has generally been interdisciplinary.
