Communications of the ACM
The role of government in the evolution of the Internet
Communications of the ACM
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Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) environments havetraditionally made heavy use of network technology to allow users(often at different locations) to work together via computersystems. However, this dependency of CSCW applications on theunderlying network technology has up to now not been a real issuewithin the community. CSCW research has traditionally focused onthe design of shared environment applications that run on thisunderlying network, e.g., the development of interaction andpresentation techniques for shared tasks. Also, CSCW has been atestbed for design methodologies such as the ethnographic analysisof user behaviour. Although we support this emphasis on socialscience within the field, we feel that in this trulymultidisciplinary area researchers should become more aware ofnetwork-related research issues. A number of parallel events can beidentified that triggered our concern:" The move from Local Area Network technology to Wide AreaNetwork technology (the global Internet) for CSCW applications." The evolution of this Internet towards commercialization ofservices and the privatisation of many telecommunication serviceproviders in Europe." The political debate over the Information Super Highway,necessary to support the increasing bandwidth requirements typicalfor CSCW applications that require the use of multiple channels ofinformation.The move towards the Internet has given us the opportunity forglobal participation in CSCW environments, resulting in a moregeneric utilization of this technology. However, the caveat for theCSCW community lies in the fact that we now no longer fully controlour shared environments, and have become more dependent on theglobal decision-making process regarding network infrastructure.The same institution that gave our research community access tointernetworking in the late-1970s, the National Science Foundation(NSF), has decided that further governmental funding of the NSFNETbackbone, which constituted a major part of Internet infrastructurein the USA, is no longer required. Commercial service providers nowoperate major backbone services for the Internet on a commercialbasis [8]. These commercial network providers thus take charge overessential pieces of Internet infrastructure, taking decisions whichcould have a serious impact on distributed multimedia servicesprovided by the Internet such as the World-Wide Web and MBONE,which we'll discuss further on. In Europe, a similar development istaking place: traditional, often monopoly-based, network providerssuch as British Telecom and the Dutch PTT Telecom have recentlybeen privatised and are in the process of reconsidering their tasksand services. The debate in both the USA and Europe over theInformation Super Highway or National Information Infrastructure(NII) gives further evidence that governments will not be able tomaintain development and support of new high-bandwidth informationservices in the near future.This, however, is only one network-related development thatdirectly concerns the CSCW community. New standards are emergingfor the transmission of real-time high-bandwidth data over Internetconnections. This high-bandwidth data typically involve video andaudio information from shared multimedia communicationenvironments. In the next section, we will discuss what thesestandards might provide in terms of functionality to the CSCWcommunity, and what constraints these standards introduce. They areoften defined by network researchers who have a genuine interest inproviding network capabilities, but typically do not have the samemeans as the CSCW community to regard cognitive ergonomical aspectsof network functionality. We try to demonstrate the importance of adialogue between the two areas of research, a cross-fertilizationfrom which both communities will benefit.The current attitude in the CSCW community towards connectivityis very similar to the attitude towards computing power in thefield of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in the late 1970s: theinfrastructure necessary to apply our research ideas is not of ourconcern, and will be delivered by others. That may have been truefor direct manipulation systems, but to what extend will it be truefor shared real-time multimedia environments?