During recent months there has been an explosion in the media and in public awareness of the National Information Infrastructure (NII) or ``information superhighway'' and its most famous component, the Internet. From Time Magazine to Technology Review, from trade journals to daily newspapers, from alumni newsletters to professional magazines, the NII has moved from the Science and Technology sections to the front page, with regular stories about its history and nature and its numerous applications in education, commerce, medicine, government, and science. Stories abound on the many new electronic locales in ``hyperspace'' for groups sharing common interests, and of new public access to high-tech marvels such as the images of the recent comet collisions with Jupiter being acquired by NASA, transmitted, stored, displayed, and studied by grade school students. The media blitz is puzzling to much of the technical community, who have actively used the Internet and its many powerful tools for more than a decade almost without conscious thought: telnet, ftp, email, and bulletin boards have been in daily use for several years by most scientists and engineers as well as many in the library and medical communities. The ability to share data, acquire literature, and stay in close and constant touch with colleagues around the world is taken for granted in the technical community. The recent discovery of the NII by a much wider audience and its promotion as a national effort with profound economic and political as well as technical implications is bound to have a fundamental impact on its future development and use. As a wider public gains access to the most popular tools of the NII such as telnet, ftp, archie, gopher, veronica, wais, the World Wide Web (WWW), and mosaic, the great potential for public benefit is threatened by the perhaps greater potential for chaos due to the sheer volume of users, nodes, applications, tools, and networks. The blessings of wide access to library catalogs, software, educational information, interest groups, travel information, and consumer products are dimmed if the sites sought are too crowded to enter, if the image data take hours to download, if the data are inaccurate, if sensitive files are read or altered by unauthorized entry, if the existing tools do not enable the user to find the information sought in a timely fashion, or if the data are incompatible with the applications software.
Given the laissez faire principles underlying much of the explosive growth of the NII with its minimalist approach to central control, it is critically important that the principles enabling the net be understood at least in general terms by those who influence its development, and that the technical community actively participate both in educating the public and in the development of the networks. Conversely, it is absolutely essential that portions of the user community cooperate with those developing the tools in order to ensure that the tools are genuinely useful in real applications. In any large scale system like the NII there are delicate balances among competing goals. There is a constant tension between the standardization necessary for compatibility of the many components and the evolving technologies and software that promise better performance, between maintaining the integrity and security of the data while making it available to the desired community, between permitting the widest possible access and maintaining network speed and reliability, between preserving an enormously valuable scientific and technological tool for research and development and providing consumer services for profit.
The success and utility of the NII Network will depend on its ease of use and the number of tasks it can perform. For this reason the emphasis must be on making the NII user-driven and user-friendly. The NII must be a transparent and seamless network that is capable of accommodating users with minimum facilities.