Loosening traffic on the internet

COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO. - Anyone who has been stalled on the information superhighway by the long time it takes to download a document or to watch a computer screen slowly and laboriously "paint" the home page of a Web site would have been encouraged by last week's meeting of the year-old and rapidly-growing U.S. Internet Council.

Reason: Nearly 150 state legislators, communications policy analysts and business leaders representing the computer, software, microprocessor, telecommunications and cable TV industries assembled here at the El Pomar Conference Center to begin to define a positive Internet policy for the states.

Joe Nacchio, former superstar AT&T executive and now CEO of the new Denver-based Qwest Communications, which is building a fiber optic-based communications network linking more than 100 cities in the U.S, gave a visionary barn-burner on how new technology is making old public policies obsolete and stimulating new enterprises and new strategies for serving people and businesses in the U.S.

U S West Communications CEO Sol Trujillo provided USIC participants a new vision of the Internet future based on high-speed communications engineered into existing telephone infrastructure.

Don Telage of Network Solutions Inc., the people who make sure that the Internet address you want is not already being used by someone else, talked about the growing need to manage in a professional way the .com, .edu, .org, .gov, and other tags at the end of your Internet address, especially as the Internet spreads to growing numbers of users outside the U.S.

Bill Archey, president of the American Electronics Association, summarized a new AEA study showing state-by-state economic benefits of high technology where the West in general and especially the Rocky Mountain West are among the leaders in high tech employment, employment growth and high tech exports.

In addition, the USIC group took a side trip to Boulder, where they visited research, development and testing facilities of the cable TV and telephone industries.

Everyone from Internet users and computer and software manufacturers to policy makers is beginning to realize that access to the Internet is primarily through copper telephone lines or the coaxial cable of the CATV provider. Digital information may spin around the nation, and on around the world, on a highway of fiber optic strands, but it almost always leaves the home or business on copper or coaxial cable.

Moreover, this is likely to be the case for a long time to come for most people and businesses, especially smaller businesses and communities (including many suburban areas) and anyone located outside densely populated urban areas.

Result: Political and business leaders who see economic development potential in the expansion of the Internet are increasingly concerned with ways to speed up the experience and that means ways to hasten the spread of new high-speed transport being developed by the telephone and cable industries.

However, there's a joker in the deck. Current federal policy favors "trickle down competition" over an aggressive "invest and build" strategy .

Result: With "trickle down competition" people and small businesses in suburbs, small towns and rural areas will have to wait a long time for competitors to come in and drive new technology that will speed up access to the Internet. By acting at the state level, the USIC might change that prospect, which will help everyone, but especially those in the South and West. Here is another example of the wisdom of federalism: States can fix what federal authorities have screwed up.