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 <NIC.MERIT.EDU> /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.