PANEL ON FEDERAL GII ACTIVITIES GII: GETTING FROM HERE TO THERE;
THE PATH IS NOT SO CLEAR

Steven N. Goldstein

Program Director
International Networking Coordination
National Science Foundation
Arlington, Virginia 22230, USA
goldstein@nsf.gov

INTRODUCTION

The following points addressed include unofficial (personal) opinions of the activities and priorities of the National Science Foundation with respect to deve-loping the Global Information Infrastructure as well as observations and sugges-tions for developing countries based on the author's work in building global Internet connectivity.* They are presented in a highlighted format.

[PERSONAL] VISION OF GLOBAL INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE

• Free and open global [inter-]connection opportunities

• Unrestricted access by individuals to [fairly priced] information

• Unfettered individual rights to publish information [at fair prices]

• Protection for intellectual property rights

• Reasonable compatibility among information formats to enable widespread exchange and retrieval across a range of technologies

• End-user friendliness

FUNDING POSSIBILITIES

• Suggested goal: widespread, supported end-user base and system sustain- ability

• Stimulus should be local, in-country

- Ministries (Education and Culture, Research, Telecommunications, Health, Trade, Agriculture, ...)

- Telecommunications service providers (e.g., PTTs)

• Startup capital may have to come from external sources

- World and regional development banks

- Overseas development agencies

- Philanthropic foundations

• Startup operations may involve a wider range of actors

- All of the above, and

- United Nations Agencies (e.g., UNDP, UNESCO)

- Regional organizations (e.g., NATO)

• Private investment and operations should be actively encouraged

- Entrepreneurial opportunities

- Private venture capital

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (NFS) ACTIVITY IN GII DEVELOPMENT

• Continued stimulus of Internet technology and infrastructure

• Digital Libraries program activity

• Networked information discovery and retrieval (NIDR) project

• High performance computing programs

• National Educational Infrastructure Program

SIGNIFICANT TRENDS IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS

• Internet "explosion"

• User-friendly applications

• "In-band" advertising of information products

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TRENDS AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

• Potential for instant mass access to the same information that is available to the more developed world

[PERSONAL VIEW OF] NSF: TOP AGENDA ITEMS RELATED TO GII

• Transition to private sector service provision

• Continued participation and pioneering in global research and education networking

[PERSONAL VIEW OF] TOP AGENDA ITEMS FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

• Open information society

• Governments' awareness and leadership

Q & A_________________

DISCUSSIONS
 
 

[David Penniman]

What are the exceptions [to international half-circuit costs], where the U.S. is not necessarily the cheapest international destination?

[Steve Goldstein]

These are basically insignificant. Maybe there are some ways you can get bet-ween the adjacent European countries at about the same price or cheaper. There are some transborder crossings that would be wise to examine, for example, that between Argentina and Chile. But in general it will be just as cheap; for exam-ple, to go from Santiago in Chile to Miami would be to go from Santiago to a city across the border in Argentina or Peru. Maybe even cheaper. If you want more examples of those cost differentials, for example, look at Indonesia. The U.S. half-circuit costs $3500 per month for a 64 kbps; yet the Indonesian half-circuit would cost $8500 per month for the same circuit. And, for Australia, for the same $8500 per month half circuit from Indonesia, it would cost probably $4500 to $5000 per month for the Australian half-circuit.

[Lisbeth Levey]

I am interested in Africa, and I guess one of the things that concerned me is that once you are talking about country-to-country networking, e-mail is really the way to go because it is much cheaper than fax communications. But once you begin to talk about file transfer, let's forget about the graphics now, it can become quite expensive because institutions pay for the number of bytes trans-ferred. So it seems to me that for a short term one must do a careful cost analysis between transferring documents via networks, sending hard copies, using CD-ROMs, and other media.

[Steve Goldstein]

Yes. I guess I can sum up that what you are saying is that in many countries, even in this country, wide-area computer networking is not cheap, so we've got to be very careful about how to use it and look at the various types of ways in doing that. If there is a certain immediacy for computer networking, certainly the im-portant thing is pricing it. By the way, I feel very grateful to my colleagues in the UNINETT, the network of the Republic of South Africa. They had a race-blind policy, even during the days of Apartheid. Soon after President Bush lifted the ban on commerce for the South Africa, they called and asked if they could con-nect. We said, "OK, you can connect now, we had to honor that ban as long as it existed." They have been very generous with their own bandwidth resources and have actually been transferring mail from neighboring countries throughout Africa. In recognition of that, NSF provided a bit of financial assistance to enable them to increase their bandwidth from 64 kbps to 128 kbps. They are doing a tremendous job and are helping their neighboring countries.

[M. Wali]

To what extent is the National Science Foundation chartered for developing countries?

[Steve Goldstein]

Our charter is to provide basically for the health of U.S. research, scientific, and educational programs. NSF is not a foreign-assistance organization. I justify my activity on the basis that science is an international, global activity that isn't just in the U.S. and because U.S. scientists and educators have to be able to commu-nicate with their colleagues and exchange resources across their national borders. Whenever possible I do my best to help and certainly have helped people who have made inquiries about Internet. We help them to connect.

I work very closely with other organizations to try to get them to help each other. For example, at the Organization of American States, my good colleague, Saul Hahn, almost single-handedly supported the development of Internet in Latin America and made it available to many in that region. I think finally some other agencies of the U.S. government are beginning to understand the importan-ce of computer networking in development. I do know that there are proposals for African networking that are being considered in the U.S. Agency for Inter-national Development (US AID). The U.S. Information Agency (USIA) has all of a sudden realized that there is a new information age, and they too are jumping into this; presumably my trip to the Philippines was funded from this type of interest. But they have a budget much less than that of US AID. The French government has been involved too in Africa. A French organization called Orstom funds RIO (Reseaux InterOrdinaires or computer networking) network-ing in Africa. The United Nations Development Program (UNPD) is also in-volved, and there are other organizations as well. We [NSF] funded one of the first and biggest networks in the U.S., so we are doing whatever we can to pro-vide advice and connection assistance, but not much by finance.

[Peter Young]

One more question.

[Mariano Maura]

What is the current situation in Latin American, and who are coordinating the Internet activities?

[Steve Goldstein]

The question is what is the status in South America or all Latin America?

First of all, I think, in 1991, we had the first meeting of Latin America net-workers in Rio de Janeiro. There was a lot of in-fighting there. I remember I wanted to leave the day early because I was kind of disgusted. My friends came and begged us, "You can't do that; please stay to the end." In the final hours, they came to have some kind of agreement out of that. I mention that not to em-barrass my colleagues but to realize how much progress has occurred since then. Just this week or last, there was the 4th Permanent Forum for Latin America networking in Buenos Aires. I was supposed to be there, and the meeting was supposed to be at the end of October. But then they changed the date and I had already agreed to speak in Paris. There is extensive communication and coopera-tion among Latin American networkers. I think that one of the strong forces has been the leadership in Peru and also in Costa Rica. By the way, all the govern-ment agencies in Costa Rica are on the Internet now. In central America, Costa Rica is the main country that is connecting now. Two countries are also con-nected through Costa Rica: Panama and Nicaragua. We understand that Guate-mala is on the way, and so is El Salvador, and the Honduras. By the way, we did get permission to route Cuban traffic on our National Science Foundation Net-work. But, because of the political situation, we cannot give any assistance from the U.S. to Cuba. There is also a Caribbean University Network, which now has telephone dial into Jamaica, and from Jamaica they transfer traffic over a fiber-optic link to the U.S.

Most of South America is connected, except a few small countries. Bolivia and Paraguay are not yet connected. Bolivia has quite a number of conflicting internal parties. One of these days, they will kiss and make up and will connect with the U.S. I hope that will happen pretty soon.

I just got a note from a colleague from Paraguay saying they are about to con-nect. So I think, with exception of a few very small countries on the north coast of South America, everybody else will be connected.

By the way in closing, let me just finish what I've talked about the private sec-tor. Let me mention a success story of Ecuador -- Ecuador's largest bank, Banco del Pacifico, which is an equivalent, say, to the U.S .Chase Manhattan Bank. The President of the bank had some kind of health problem. His doctors knew that the National Library of Medicine in the U.S. has an awful lot of medical information available which might help with his problem. So somebody, maybe my good friend, Richard [Hsieh], gave him the permission to dial into the NLM database and download information. As a result, the bank president said to his vice president for research and development, "we must have network in Ecua-dor." So first they had Bitnet, and they found out that Bitnet was not sufficient for them, so they went into Internet. I worked a lot with this vice president and made contacts and so forth to get things going for him. Very quickly, because he has the money from the bank behind him, and because he was such a bright per-son himself, he just went and built this network. They even have a node of the network in a branch of the bank in the Galapagos Islands, some 600 miles off to the west of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean. They are connected into the Internet via satellite. So, this is ECUANET, which is sponsored by the bank, which pro-vides networking into education institutions and does not charge their people. Here is an instance of a private effort of a particular country's enlightened and inspired business man, who is also a national patriot and national leader.

[Peter Young]

My panel topic this morning is on federal GII activities. I want to point out the conference document identifying problems and concerns about GII. As we begin to get into the discussion, we need to bear these issues in mind. Steve's title is: "GII: Getting from here to there; the path is not so clear." I think he is interested in getting us into the "clear" path. Chris Casey has distributed hand-outs. Chris is a Technology Policy Adviser to Senator Ted Kennedy. Chris has a degree from University of California at Santa Barbara. I don't know whether all of you have experience with the Senate Gopher. But, I wonder, Chris, was this enough to make the difference in last week's senate election results for the Senator [Kennedy]?

[Chris Casey]

Thank you very much. The title I have, Technology Policy Advisor, is really something which I indulge myself in. Also, I am the one who takes care of all the necessary evils in maintaining the network. As you mentioned, as matter of fact, we had a number of political campaigns which made effective and extensive use of Internet. While I can't say whether it made a difference or not, we are there!