| Chapter 1: | A Global, Low-Cost Network Thrives |
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The innovation is expected. The most often-mentioned hurdles to a low-cost system with access for all are not technological. The survey respondents nearly unanimously said that the development of a worldwide network with easy access, smooth data flow, and availability everywhere at a low cost depends upon the appropriate balance of political and economic support.
The battle about political and economic control of the Internet is evident in the loud debate in the U.S. Congress and Federal Communications Commission in 2006 about “network neutrality” (with Internet-tech companies such as Microsoft and Google facing off against the major telecommunications corporations such as AT&T that provide the data pipelines) and in the appearance of a newly formed world organization inspired by the UN’s World Summit on the Information Society—the Internet Governance Forum (http://www.intgovforum.org/), which met for the first time in October 2006.
The technology to make the Internet easy to use continues to evolve. World Wide Web innovator Tim Berners-Lee and other Internet engineers in the World Wide Web Consortium are working on building the “semantic Web,” which they expect will enable users worldwide to find data in a more naturally intuitive manner. But at the group’s May WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, Berners-Lee also took the time to campaign against U.S. proposals to change to an Internet system in which data from companies or institutions that can pay more are given priority over those that cannot or will not. He warned that this would move the network into “a dark period,” and said, “Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring…I think it is one and will remain as one.”
The problem of defeating the digital divide has captivated many key Internet stakeholders for years, and their efforts continue. Nicholas Negroponte of MIT’s Media Lab has been working more than a decade to bring to life the optimistic predictions he made about an easily accessible global information network in his 1995 book Being Digital.