International aspects of computer communications

International aspects of computer communicatio, is

Ithiel de Sola P o o l

The current and predictable trends in international computer communications are outl ined. The opportunities that arise through the use of these services are then discussed. The opportunit ies wi l l not be grasped unless the problems connected w i th international communications are solved. The author discusses the need for the d e v e l o p m e n t of in ternat iona l standards, the development of payment systems for mult i faceted international systems, the need for security and privacy of information, the tendency for companies to slow down innovation as a result of their sunk inves tments in present systems, and the barriers to the free f low of information imposed by national interests.

The author is Professor of the Depart - ment of Political Science, Room 53- 401 , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massa- chusetts 02139 , USA.

A version of this article was originally prepared for the Conference on Computer/Telecommunications Policy held in Paris, France, 4-6 February 1975, under the sponsorship of the Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

1 Illustrations: 1. General Electric's Mark I11 service offers users in the USA, Europe, and Japan access to its computers in Ohio on a time-shared basis. 2. The Plato system of the University of Illinois or Tymnet's USA-wide distribution of

continued p34

To begin with a definition of the topic, 'computer communication' is any communication in which, at at least one point, the message is stored in computer memory and then processed or transmitted under computer control. This definition includes computer-to-computer communication, as in computer networks, man-to-computer or computer-to-man (as when a person works on a computer from a remote terminal) communication, and man-to-man communication if computers that store, address, and forward the message are placed between the men, as in message-switched communication systems. From the user's point of view, the communications under discussion may be divided into at least six distinct services: l

I. Time-shared remote computing. 2. Computer-aided instruction. 3. Distributed management information services. 4. Funds transfers. 5. Information retrieval from remote data bases. 6. Message delivery.

To the user these services may seem quite distinct. From the system's point of view the overlap is considerable. They do, however, represent different types of user, whose different demands influence the specific design of any particular computer/communication system.

The predictable context

Two trends are fairly certain to continue: the international flow of telecommunication, including computer communication, will continue to grow and its cost will be increasingly insensitive to distance.

The figures on the current growth of international telecommunication are well known. International traffic has been growing at the median rate of about 18% per year, 2 while the number of hand sets in the world has been growing at 7% per year. The growth of domestic telephone calls in the OECD countries has recently been 15% per year.

The only competitors in growth rate with international voice telephony are telex and data communication. The growth rate of international telex from the USA between 1964 and 1972 was about 33% per year slowing to 27% towards the end, compared to a growth

T E L E C O M M U N I C A T I O N S POLICY December 1976 33

International aspects

Table 1. Bell system coaxial cable systems

Name Capacity (voice circuits)

L1 1 800 L3 9 000 L4 32 000 L5 108 000 WT4 241 900

of computer communications

of US international telephony of 25% per year. An annual percentage growth figure for computer data communication is perhaps

cost misleading for it is so new that we are talking of an ascent in recent (S/voice circuit/ years from zero: that makes the percentage astronomical, which is mile at 100% fill)

nevertheless, not entirely an illusion. 17.22 While all exponential growth must stop eventually, as boundary 6.49 constraints operate, these trends will not change in the near future. 3.15 1.21 International telecommunication will continue to grow, among other 1.02 (waveguide) reasons, because long-distance costs are falling.

Rates do not necessarily reflect costs: rates change slowly. Also political pressures favour subsidy to ordinary home users of local calls at the expense of the institutional users of the long lines. There is general recognition among telephone men that the domain in which costs have fallen most and will continue to fall most is long-distance transmission. The costs of switching, of billing, and of the local loop are by now the greatest part of the costs of a long-distance call (these are costs that do not vary with distance). Since there is no obvious breakthrough pending in these costs, the savings that will result from new long-distance technologies may not bring total costs down much, but those variable costs that make the price of a long-distance call a partial function of distance are disappearing. 3 Consider, for example, the advances in coaxial cable and the even more dramatic prospects of such devices as optical waveguides. Each successive generation of carrier has much greater capacity and markedly lower costs per circuit (Table 1). The capacity that such devices as L-5 or waveguides offer will pay for itself only on the busiest routes. However, transmission costs are also falling in microwave transmission and in undersea cables. Even without the advent of the satellite, long- distance transmission costs are becoming a minor part of the total bill? It is clear that the marginal cost o f transmitting extra miles is a vanishing number and even the average cost (which is the more important figure) is 'just pennies', even over such distances as that across the USA.

If distance was already a minor factor without satellites, with them it has become trivial. For a signal that travels 22 300 miles up and 22 300 miles down, it can hardly be important whether the base of the triangle is 1200 or 12 000 miles. 5

That is the predictable context in which political decisions and social policy will operate. Unless narrow-minded compulsion for- bids, we can expect a world in which telecommunication over long distances costs no more than regional communication, and in which, therefore, the volume of interaction over long distances greatly increases.

Source: Evidence offered in testimony to Hart Subcommittee, 1973, p 802 (Sub- committee on Antitrust and Monopoly, Committee on the Judiciary, US Senate), from statement by McGowan for MCI. Original source: AT&T testimony in FCC docket 18128.

continued from p33 diagnostic CAI programmes to hospitals and medical schools (up to February 1974 2500 h per month were being delivered free: from June 1974, the charge was $ 5 . 0 0 dollars per connect hour and 66 institutions were still taking 2 0 0 0 h per month of instructions). 3. Sears Roebuck's intelligent cash registers report point-of-sale information all day long to a local computer which late at night dumps some of that information to a computer at national headquarters. 4. Reconciliation of balances between banks. 5. Medline. 6. The 'mail" facilities included in most time-sharing systems. 2Median of 125 cou, ntries from The World's Telephones for the last two years. 3This point needs to be emphasised. Throughout this article note is taken of communication costs as one very real burden on computing that must be taken into account. At the same time the falling costs of long-distance communication are emphasised. There is no contradiction here, Communications might remain an important cost (often the driving one) even if the difference in the communica- t ion cost between 3 0 0 and 1500 miles were to fall to zero, 4 AT&T thinks nothing of routing calls in- tended to go up and down one coast of the USA from coast to coast and back again if more direct circuits are busy or in- capacitated. Load levelling is far more important to them than distance. 5 Indeed, US studies of future costs have tended to show increasing costs with distance up to about 3 0 0 miles, for it does make a difference whether a message travels only in the local switching system or has to go out on to the interurban system. From 300 to 3000 miles, however, will make almost no difference.

T h e o p p o r t u n i t i e s

The advantages to mankind of progress in international computer communication may be summarised as follows:

• Distributed activity can increase economy in the use of the world's resources.

• Communication accelerates technical progress. • The less developed countries are in particular need of access to

information. • Telecommunications can facilitate world trade.

3 4 T E L E C O M M U N I C A T I O N S P O L I C Y December 1976

e A major conference on the subject was held in Salines, France as early as 1970. 7In the UK such studies have been carried out by the Communications Studies Group at the University of Lon- don. Similar studies of diaries of contacts among off ice-holders have been made in Fin land, I re land, No rway , the Ne the r lands , and Sweden . The Confederation Europ~ene de Post et T~l~communications (CEPT) has pro- moted such research studies. A conference reviewing the results was held in 1974 at the International Institute of Management in Berlin. 8 p. Goldmark, New Rural Society Project, Goldmark Communications, and The New Rural Society, Cornell University Lecture Series, 1973.

International aspects of computer communications

The newer technologies of information will facilitate diversity in cultural expression and reduce the tendency of the mass media to impose a single style of world culture.

Conservation o f resources Adequate communication facilities permit the economically optimal location of activities. Many forecasters predict that telecommunications will promote urban decentralisation (the movement of business and cultural life out of overcrowded cities).

The relationship of computers and telecommunications to regional planning and decentralisation has been extensively discussed in Europe. 6 In a number of countries the character of contacts and communications within the government bureaucracy has been studied, with a view to transferring activities not dependent on face-to-face contact out of the capital. 7 These studies tend to show that person-to-person contact is important when the purpose of the meeting is tO persuade or to form an assessment of previously unknown individuals. For exchange of information among people who already know each other telecommunications is as good or better.

A number of authorities, for example Goldmark, 8 argue that with adequate communication facilities rural life can be made attractive enough to check migration to urban metropolises, and indeed attractive enough to draw people out of them. Such decentralisation, it is argued, could produce vast savings, for the capital required to enable millions of people to cohabit the same few square miles of ground are enormous. Bringing the means of life into citie~ and removing the waste become complex and expensive operations. On the other hand, there are the costs of decentralisation (in length of roads, for example). However, if improved communication made life attractive either close to or far away from urban centres, as economic considerations dictated, and permitted business to be carried out efficiently from either place, then activities could be located wherever economically optimal in terms of transportation and resources costs. Removal of one constraint on location cannot but help bring costs down as locations are picked to satisfy the remaining constraints.

Secondly, lowered long-distance communication costs discourage duplication of information facilities. An important example is the trade-off between computer networking and minicomputers. A close- run technological race is underway. As the cost of computer memory falls it becomes economical to store large masses of information at many locations and thus to avoid the communication costs of shipping data from place to place. As communication costs fall it becomes economical to keep any item of data in only one place and access it by telecommunications from long distances.

Whatever the outcome, both minis and networks will be with us. The costs of data are not merely the costs of storage. Much higher are the costs of generating the data, checking them, updating them in the various files in which they may be scattered, and seeing to it that those updated files are consistent in their various parts. For economy, one would like to avoid duplicating those expensive data-handling activities, at least for those kinds of data which undergo change over time. Even data which never change once stored, for example the text of yesterday's newspaper, have to be shipped to the many libraries that will, if storage is cheap enough, keep them on file for local access.

TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY December 1976 35


s For example, in the preparation of this paper I wanted certain figures on telephone traffic in different countries. The demand for that kind of information by various planners and scholars has led to the recent growth of reference books and reports on the subject. There is a limit, however, to what can be produced in hard copy for library deposit. For those who want the data more quickly, or want detailed data that have not been otherwise published, the alternative is to be able, with permission, to get on-l ine to the operating data of the source organisation, in this case the national telephone systems.

Such initial shipment of data for storage may be done by the physical transport of the storage medium or it may be done electronically, depending on relative costs. There is a role, therefore, for both low- cost scattered storage of data and for low-cost transmission of data over networks, with the balance between these options constantly shifting as technology changes their relative costs.

The falling costs of communications over far-flung networks and of local storage will both contribute to reducing the otherwise growing burden of information management. Together they may help save society from drowning in the masses of data which a modem technological civilisation generates and which it needs if it is to operate effectively.

Consider for a moment the example of libraries. With a seven-year doubling time for research libraries, obviously only a very few great depository collections can exist. Even those few famous libraries are less able to cope with the flood of documents, reports, and other fugitive materials that contain much of what is essential knowledge in a period of rapid change. The Harvard University Library and the New York Public Library have recently made American publishers rather unhappy by taking the lead- in forming a cooperative arrangement for division of labour, specialised collecting and sharing of resources, partly by telecommunications. Those libraries have recognised that they are reaching the inflection point at which exponential growth of collections of books and documents must slow. Increasingly, they will have to find ways of providing access to knowledge by telecommunication between the user, wherever he is, and the medium storing that knowledge, wherever it happens to be located, rather than by depositing copies of all documents in each library.

That conclusion, if correct, does not imply the desirability of building one or a few giant central archives to which everyone will have remote access. On the contrary, it implies the end of such primate depositories and the retention of much data in their normal place of origination. 9 The advance filtering required to assemble the data one thinks will be wanted into static collections in research archives is a massive operation that can be economically justified only for data for which there is a predictably high volume of use. Wasteful activity in archiving can be reduced if networking permits data to be accessed in their natural habitat, where they accumulate in the process of daily work.

The diseconomy of centralising all data becomes obvious to anyone who has designed an actual information system for an organisation. When Avis designed its Wizard system it soon became clear that the cost of communicating everything to a central computer in real time would be too high and that it would be more economical to invest in intelligent terminals that would de most of the work and would transmit and receive only a few essential pieces of information. That is a typical situation and illustrates the role of the minicomputer in the economic race between communication and minis. Indeed, of the six major uses of computer communications listed above it is clear that three necessarily involve distributed origination of data on a continuous basis. In point-to-point message systems, in management of a large organisation, and in funds transfer, activity is widespread and it would be economically absurd to try to capture all data in any one place. Time-sharing systems in the present computer generation

36 TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY December 1976

' °The four Scandinavian nations have already agreed to establish a Nordic data network that is scheduled to begin operation in 1977 and achieve all-country coverage by 1980.


do bring all calculations to the host computer, but with the development of minicomputers and intelligent terminals the expectation is that in the next generation only occasional calculations requiring large-core or archived data will travel, and most operations will remain localised.

Information retrieval from data archives is the application where the economics is most sensitive to the outcome of the race between alternative technologies. It is likely, however, that there will be no economic advantage in the bringing together of specialised archives under a single roof. The feared establishment of a national data centre into which all data on everyone would be assembled in a single place has been bypassed, not only because it is a nightmare to libertarians, but also because it no longer would have any technical or economic advantage. What remains unresolvable until the outcome of the race between minis and communications is clearer is how many local copies of a specialised data base it is economical to have. Should various specialised libraries ship tapes to each other and local depositories for local use or be on-line to each other and to users? Clearly the answer is both, but in varying proportions as the current rates charged and the technology of the moment dictate.

Considering all six of the major uses of computer communication it may be concluded that an implication of balancing the costs of duplicated activities and communication is that extensive preliminary preprocessing of data will be done in their normal operational habitat. Data resources will be geographically distributed, sometimes centralised in many specialised archives, but not centralised in only a few great research or operating centres.

International implications. If networks connecting multiple distributed data sources with multiple distributed data users can facilitate the economic allocation of human activities and reduce duplicative activities, then that is just as true across national borders as within them. While the sheer costs of transmission in the satellite era are likely to be sufficiently insensitive to distance to justify global data networking, there are reasons for the regional development of many activities. Political and social affinity between countries make it easier for them to work together on network development. '° Language areas are likely to develop their own services. Also, some kinds of data are most interesting to those living in the nearby areas (eg market and agricultural information). From a technical point of view, however, national boundaries are irrelevant. If there are good economic arguments for regional division of labour among distributed data sources, and for access to remote sources, the argument is just as strong across boundaries as within them.

This was said far more eloquently by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations in 1776. He applied his analysis to physical commodities. The argument is just the same for electronic signals. As Smith pointed out, from the point of view of economic productivity all parties benefit from division of labour and exchange so that each party does that in which he has a comparative advantage. But Smith was not a dogmatist. He recognised other considerations than sheer productivity which might justify restrictions on trade at national boundaries, national-security considerations being the most important. Clearly, it is not to be argued that there are no considerations for designing communication flows with an eye to



national entities. The consideration of economic productivity taken by itself, however, would urge the utmost international freedom of data flows. If nations try to duplicate within their own borders that data which they can buy more cheaply by trade, they should know that they are paying a price for whatever advantage it is they are seeking by that autarchy.

Acceleration of technical progress Facilities for the collegial exchange of information are the infrastructure of science and of its practical application. Universities, academies, libraries, journals, conferences, and now information- retrieval systems are the institutional base for science. These operate on a highly cosmopolitan basis. Note, for example, the growth of international congresses-

'Two or three congresses or conferences took place annually in the world from 1838 to

1860. Beginning in 1900, a hundred or so congresses were held annually, and in 1910 two

hundred per year took place. At present the number of congresses, conferences, symposia

organised or sponsored by international organisations is about 3000, not including all the

purely administrative and working group meetings. ,H

There are now estimated to be 100000 scholarly and technical journals in the world.

Particularly noteworthy is the rapid growth of on-line data-base publishing. There are many commercial services such as stock-market quotations, real-estate listings, and legal-citation reference services. There are many statistical data bases on-line; one firm, Data Resources, Inc, offers 1 000 000 time series of economic data on-line. About 30 bibliographic data bases are commercially available on-line through two main vendors. There were about 700 000 searches of those data bases in 1973 and will be over one million in 1974. ~2

1, Congressalia, 1974, No4, p243 . lz Cf. Martha Williams, A S I S Yearbook on In fo rmat ion Science, 1974.

Information needs of less developed countries The less developed countries (LDCs) require large injections of information in the form of technology transfer if they are to have economic growth and development. However, the means for acquiring it are largely beyond their reach. Today a chasm separates the research facilities available in developed countries (such as the Library of Congress, Weidner and New York Public Libraries, the British Museum, the Moscow State Library) from the extremely limited research facilities in LDCs.

With the development of data-base publishing to cope with the flood of new information, the position of the LDCs will worsen. They will not have access to such information resources unless some method to facilitate information transfer is devised. Given their lack of resources they cannot be expected to use modern information- retrieval systems, and computer communication to any extent unless present costs are reduced by at least an order of magnitude.

Such a fall in the costs of long-distance computer telecommunication is not out of the question. It seems likely that an international data communications network using packet-switching technology could make access to data bases available from anywhere in the world at a very low communications cost. With such a network the information gap would rapidly be narrowed. A researcher in a university or planning office in an LDC without adequate reference

38 TELECOMM U NICATIONS POLICY December 1976


sources of its own could retrieve a fact from whatever data base he wished anywhere in the world for little more than the cost of a domestic telephone call.

In short, as advanced countries increasingly transfer their reference materials from hard-copy libraries to computerised retrieval systems, the LDCs will either fall further behind in information capacity or will begin to catch up, depending upon whether or not they are linked to these new information stores by telecommunications.

For a telecommunications system to serve the LDCs effectively as a bearer of technical knowledge, it must have certain characteristics. It must be cheap. It must be reliable, relatively rugged, and not require highly sophisticated maintenance and operating personnel. It must operate even in the absence of an elaborate infrastructure of stable electric current, national microwave or cable networks, and smoothly functioning telephone services. Finally it must link the LDC at its will to any possible sources of data, not just to ones in a favoured metropolis on which it is dependent. These are not insoluble requirements. There are technical options in the satellite systems chosen, in the possibilities of message switching, and in the pattern of networking which may make these aims quite achievable.

It is often assumed that if an LDC cannot make its ordinary telephone system work satisfactorily, then it certainly cannot use sophisticated new technology such as, for example, a packet-switched computer communication network using satellite transmission. This is not the case. It might have been said just before the transistor-radio revolution hit the LDCs, that if those countries could not maintain a conventional press or wide dissemination of ordinary tube radios, how would they handle the new advanced technology of the transistor. There are some advances in technology that make operation and maintenance harder and some that make them easier. The particularities of any technology must be examined before its appropriateness to the LDCs can be assessed.

International computer communication using store and forward message switching is a technology particularly well suited to the needs of the LDCs. It bypasses the problems of the ordinary telephone system. With the voice telephone call, both parties have to be on the spot at the same time, which can be very frustrating if it takes a couple of hours to complete the circuit. With a store and forward system the message sits in the computer until the circuit is available and is then sent to the terminal. That may happen at any hour of the day or night, for the printout awaits the receiver whenever he comes in. Furthermore, low-cost ground stations can be installed in remote regions, bypassing non-existent or overloaded microwave or coaxial long lines. Again, sophisticated data-processing operations can be performed by remote access to locations where the prerequisites exist. All that the local service must provide is the capability of carrying low-grade code such as that which currently delivers telex or telegrams.

Facilitation o f world trade

Obstructions to communication are the chief impediments to world trade. At a distance, a buyer or seller has trouble acquiring information about a market abroad and particularly about its short- term fluctuations. Even after a purchase order has been negotiated, documents must be transmitted confirming the funding and the



shipping arrangements. Information may be wanted about the location of the shipment at any given time and about delays en route. Currently, communications breakdowns and delays in receiving documentation are a major burden to trade, particularly since the information content is often insufficient to allow the transaction to go forward. The goods handler or banker often requires a physical legal document before he will release the shipment or the money for it. To help meet this need for documentary evidence, the world trade centres in a number of major ports are trying to launch a facsimile service that would link those world trade centres at a low cost. International voice telephone is also important to traders to help them achieve the interpersonal persuasiveness and confidence on which business transactions depend. Telex-style written-message interaction also has a major role to play.

Even at present high rates, telex is important to business especially in those areas where voice-telephone service is of poor quality and unreliable. Computer-based message-handling systems that provide store and forward capability, message switching and packet switching will not only reduce the cost of message delivery, but will make possible flexible kinds of business interaction that are now difficult at a distance. ~3

For interperson interaction across time zones the buffered nature of electronic mail improves upon telephone communications. The message is stored in the system, ready to be read when the addressee turns on his terminal. This dynamic possibility may even improve teleconferencing, because previous states of conversation can be retrieved by any party. This buffered feature is of particular value for the conduct of international trade: orders, reports, and quotations can be deposited and queued ready for reference when convenient.

In short, low-cost data communication supplemented by voice can give the trader a level of oversight over his transactions and over his goods similar to that which he now has in domestic transactions. Presumably, electronic documentation will eventually be accepted in place of the hard-copy documents now required and with that further days and weeks of delay will be eliminated.

,3 For example, wri t ten teleconferencing permits participants, each using his own language, to interact in real time. The receivers have a wri t ten text in front of them, al lowing them to look up words in the dictionary or puzzle out any translation problem before replying a few minutes later.

Cultural diversity Communications systems can be classified as (a) one-to-many, ie mass media, (b) many-to-one, eg petitions, and (c) one-to-one, eg point-to-point.

The mass media constitute one of the great socio-technical inventions of the past two centuries. By delivering identical messages to hundreds of thousands or even to millions of people, it has become possible to provide extraordinarily attractive material at very little cost per exposure. The attraction of soap operas, westerns, pop groups, and other diversions that the mass media have to offer is not limited to any one culture. These products have a universal appeal, so a world trade in them has developed. The countries that had the lead in producing pop culture, most notably the USA, have become exporters of such culture to the world. While that lead is temporary and fragile, as can be seen from the multinationalisation of the film industry and the growth of slick magazines in Europe, still it lasts long enough to cause intense distress to those who see in this foreign material a threat to indigenous cultures that they prize. The issue of what to do about cultural intrusion by foreign mass-media material is



a thorny one. It pits traditional cultural values squarely against the liberal principle of freedom of information.

Fortunately, the problem of cultural intrusion that has occurred in relation to the mass media of the recent past does not arise in the same way for the new technologies of point-to-point and computer telecommunications. Where communication is one-to-one it has much more the character of a dialogue, with both partners choosing to engage, and with both partners acting as initiators as well as receivers. Thus the growth of point-to-point telecommunication networks is one of a number of factors that promise to help break the dominance of mass media.

In various ways (a number of them computer-related) the communication system of the developed countries is becoming more differentiated and more two-way. Xerography, computer-controlled composition, and information-retrieval systems are allowing readers to obtain output more tailored to their individual wants than was the output of massive rotary presses; on-demand publishing is the trend of the technology. So too, two-way interactive cable television plus cassettes promise video experiences tailored to individual tastes in a way far different from the television and cinema of the past. Also, the technology which is the subject of today's discussion, international computer networks, provides outputs to each user that are the product of his own demands, not those of a broadcaster; it allows inputs from any point on the system.

One of the significant advantages, then, of the development of international computer-managed communication is its contribution to a trend towards the greater individualisation of communication. On the international scale the trend from one-way mass media which can only be distributed in their original form to interactive, two-way, adaptable media may offer opportunities for cultural tuning, diversity, and multipolarity of origination that do not exist today.

The problems Great as the opportunities are, the problems obstructing the realisation of those opportunities are enormous. They may be divided into five main groups:

• International agreement on standards. • Development of an international system of payments. • Satisfying demands for security and privacy of information. • Protection of sunk investments. • National interests.

Standards

A number of areas may be identified in which international standards are necessary in order to achieve the condition that virtually any terminal and computer in the world can communicate with any other terminal and computer in the world (as telephones are now virtually all linked).

Problems of standardisation have arisen with regard to pulse code modulation. Another set of problems concerns the packing of channels in Europe and the USA, with 32 channels plus 2 for signalling in Europe and with fewer channels and in-band signalling in the USA. Because of the in-band/out-of-band signalling problem it is



~4 Relevant discussion of standards are taking place in the fol lowing CCI'I-I" study groups: Special Study Group A on Data on Telephone Networks; Study Group VII on Public Data Networks; Study Group XIV on Facsimile. In the International Standards Organization, Technical Com- mittee TC97 on Information Processing has Subcommittee 6 on Data Com- munications. The projects that it is dis- cussing include message fo rmats (headers, information fields, addresses, error checking), control procedures, transmission rates, and user interface conventions (eg logging in and control v information mode distinctions.) 15The problem, however, is far from solved and is not likely to be without the setting of standards. For a discussion of retrieval-system interface standards see J. Francis Reintles and Richard Marcus, 'Research in the coupling of interactive information systems - Final report', Report ESL-R-556, MIT, 1974. ~SThe rate it pays is 15 cents per minute per half circuit, which equals six t imes the $26 000 per year for the more efficient normal circuit. It is thus economical to use SPADE if the circuit is used less than four hours per day. 17 Other systems are optimised for lower- volume routes. MARISAT, for example, services ships at sea which must have smaller, lower-cost antennae. Specific- ally, the system will use 1.2 dishes and it should cost about $55 000 to equip a ship to receive and transmit voice and data. ATS-6 is transmitt ing to $4000 ground stations in the Rocky Mountain experiment and has transmitted to 3m antennae designed to cost $200 in production quantit ies in India. ATS-6 serves such low-cost ground stations by employ- ing experimental h igh-power transmitters on board the satellite, and concentrating this power over a 600 by 1300 mile area using a 9m diameter antenna on the satellite. The net result is that ATS-6, a 1800kg satellite, produces a signal about 350 times the strength of the global beam of the 720kg INTELSAT 4.

now illegal to dial a European telephone number from a US telephone and transmit data from computer to computer - and for good reason. The US code generated includes signals that would ring telephones and busy signals in Europe. It is hoped that such problems will be solved either by agreement on conventions or by the marked fall in cost of interface devices.14

It is also to be hoped that the number of different graphic representations of the alphabet can be kept small to hold down the cost of interface computing. An adequate world alphabet would be useful. Current standards in the USA allow only 96 printing characters. Yet, even within that one country, a quick glance at many scientific and technical journals shows an alphabet several times that large, without even considering the problem of mathematical equations or figures, or chemical formulae. For multilingual communication, still more symbols are needed. A single electronic representation of that macroalphabet should be developed.

There is also need to establish standards for user interface to data bases. Today, each institution that develops a data base usually writes its own software for retrieval, each with its own distinctive commands for logging in, user identification, listing of files, subsetting, and retrieving. In a decade or two there may be dozens of systems that a given researcher might use from time to time, each with its own peculiarities. People will not trouble to learn many different systems. Some attempts have been made to solve this problem by software translation between retrieval systems. 15

There is need for agreement on spectrum allocatiol~ for the communication satellite systems that INTELSAT, NASA, and various domestic satellite systems plan for. The most critical choice is between optimisation for high-traffic segments between countries with highly developed terrestrial networks and optimisation for low-traffic segments to and from less developed countries. Present operational satellites use the 4-6 MHz band and economise on satellite sophistication by requiring expensive ground stations with antennae of 9-24 m diameter. Typically, a country will have one such earth station and will redistribute from there on its telephone lines. A country as extensive as the continental USA concentrates all its INTELSAT traffic through three earth stations, two on the east coast and one on the west. A single voice channel on INTELSAT between two points costs $26 000 per full circuit per year.

There are alternatives better suited to less developed countries. To serve points where traffic does not justify the cost of a dedicated circuit, INTELSAT has instituted the SPADE system. By making a substantial investment in SPADE ground equipment (about $500 000), a country can switch its SPADE channel to communicate with any other station similarly equipped in view of the same satellite, eliminating the need for transiting traffic on low-density routes through a transit centre at increased cost. It pays only for the time it is actually connected. 16 If a country chooses to save on ground station by using smaller than standard antennae it will pay a penalty on user charges for drawing on more satellite energy. Thus INTELSAT does its best to serve low-volume routes, but by a system optimised for high-volume routes.17

To many people interested in using satellites for the developing countries where multiple low-cost ground stations serve to substitute for extensive development of terrestrial coax and microwave networks,



the choices made so. far seem wrong. A different system, however, would not have served the bulk of the present traffic as cheaply and as easily at the time it was instituted. It is not the aim of the present discussion to argue the claims, but to identify the fact that systems choices must be made, and that these have different economic consequences for different countries.

Policy makers. Who is to make such substantive choices of standards? Procedurally, we are ill equipped to make these international decisions. Recommendations on matters such as the portion of the telephone signal used for data have been made by the CCITT (Consultative Committee on International Telephone and Telegraph of the International Telecommunications Union). The CCITT is composed of representatives of the world's operating telecommunications administrations. It operates through the medium of study groups, groups of technical representatives who meet at approximately yearly intervals to prepare draft recommendations on technical standards. Its recommendations go to the CCITT Planning Assembly, which meets at roughly triennial intervals to accept the recommendations of its study groups. Once accepted, these standards are generally adhered to and are incorporated into their designs by the world's telecommunication administrations.

The CCITT has a long history of success in establishing conditions which allow international interconnection of domestic networks with different standards. Whether it can establish standards for computer networks at a pace commensurate with the growth of national networks of that type is more doubtful.

Standards on alphabetic representation and character codes are adopted by the International Standards Organization. A draft standard exists for representing all languages that use the Roman alphabet.

There is no natural locus for standard setting on such matters as information-retrieval protocols. Groups such as The International Federation for Information Processing discuss such matters and help by exchange of views. In a world in which information retrieval becomes a daily activity of millions of people, using a wide variety of different data bases, a better instrument of coordination will certainly be needed. Spectrum allocation is handled by the ITU. Crucial decisions about the spectrum available for satellite services will be made at the 1977 and 1979 World Administrative Radio Conferences. Decisions about the basic type of satellite system to implement will be made separately by several governments in the next few years, for their domestic systems, and most importantly by INTELSAT through its Board of Governors.

The moral of all this may seem obvious: it is not. Standardisation may solve some problems, but it also inhibits technical innovation. Enlightened discussion of standards and the creation of an incentive system designed to encourage serious effort at cooperation and interconnection are much needed. Whether and where fixed standards should be adopted must be judged by those experts in each technology, who can balance the advantages against the disadvantages in each case.

A n international system o f payments

In a computer-communication system there are three sets of charges



la Agreements between carriers on international rates and the division of international revenues are negotiated in complex ways. Nonetheless, agreements have been worked out to link virtually all the world's phones. For example, AT&T has reached bilateral agreements with almost all countries which provide for an even split of the charge for most direct calls, with an extra charge (usually $3.00) for calls routed through a third country, and with a zonal system allowing for five levels of distance. Charges each way are generally equivalent, taxes aside, so as to reduce incentives to place calls from one end or the other. The world's telephone systems make a monthly accounting of calls originating in each country to other countries, These accounts are exchanged, reconciled, and the balances are transferred.

to customers: communication charges by the common carrier, communication payments to a value-added carrier, and charges for service by the computation centre or data base. There is much to be said for a system that would handle all of these in a single periodic bill to the customer, and also many problems involved in that.

The communication charges to the common carrier present relatively tractable problems. At the most primitive level the link is a telephone or telex call charged perhaps by the same formula as for a voice circuit, whether domestic or international. 18 Similarly, a dedicated line, perhaps with high data rates, represents no charging innovation.

If in the future business firms, mass media, and research centres have small low-cost ground stations on their roofs, capable of communicating directly to satellites, the user might, depending on regulatory policy, bypass the terrestrial common carrier completely. Naturally, the common carrier will not like that and will put forward reasons why it should not be done, but from an objective social point of view it is hard to see any objection. For such direct satellite links billing should not be difficult; institutions that can afford such ground station equipment are good payment risks and relatively easy to identify and contract with.

If an international value-added network (VAN) is created, some new problems in billing arise. A domestic call or private line connects the user terminal to the interface computer. For that link there appears to be no justification for any charge other than there woul;l be if the circuit were going to an ordinary computer, and no reason for any difference in the billing, which could either be charged to the call initiator or charged collect to the computer location. From the sending interface computer to the receiving interface computer the data travel on the dedicated lines of the VAN. For the use of those lines, plus the added services of packing, checking, storing and forwarding the data the VAN entrepreneur will charge his customer. If the entrepreneur is other than the PTT, this implies a second bill unless there is some agreement between the value-addeo carrier and the PTI'. Unless the value-added carrier is or collects through the PTT, he has to identify each customer, ascertain the customer's credit rating, and make a contract with him. The use of the value-added network under such circumstances may be limited to large and regular users. Any economies a VAN might offer for message delivery or information retrieval might be unavailable to the ordinary citizen in the absence of an easy billing system.

Finally, a message reaches a main computer where it commands some calculations to be made or some data to be retrieved. What is asked for there may be a very costly operation, many times as expensive as the communication cost, or, if in interactive mode, it may be a very small item. In any case the service is normally provided by some independent commercial or scientific organisation other than the carrier. There are exceptions where computing service is provided by the telephone company, eg in Japan and the UK, but such service- bureau activity by carriers will probably always be a small part of total computation. The computing services that customers seek require specialised software resident on particular computers. Meteor- ologists, physicists, economists, and physicians will each address their professional facility. Government agencies and business firms will need to use their own administrative computing centres, where their

44 TELECOMM U N I CATIONS POLICY December 1976


proprietary software and data are located. The use of specialised software or data often justifies substantial charges. The person who wants retrieval from the National Library of Medicine is seeking the product of substantial expensive activity in data collection and data organisation and he may expect to pay for his access to that very costly and unique resource.

One problem is that every such transaction between a data base or computation centre and a remote user must be under a prior arrangement in which the terms of use are specified and the user receives his password so that the computer will admit him. This allows a separate private billing system, but implies that all systems independent of the carrier will be for limited and elitist clienteles. If public services are to be open to all, the billing system will have to be joined to that of the communication carrier. Only the carrier knows every terminal that reaches any data base and has a way to bill the terminal.

International billing is even more complex for an entrepreneur other than the common carrier, such as the value-added carrier or the computation or data centre. It is harder to obtain credit information, harder to enforce payment, and takes longer to collect, when one has to operate across many national jurisdictions. The advantages of an integrated billing system operated by the common carriers are correspondingly even greater for international computer usage than for domestic. Every country's PTT has its way of billing and collecting from its customers. Also the PTT becomes a guarantor of payment to the vendor; its transfer of funds to another country is normally a lump payment of the net aggregate of charges, and does not wait on or depend on collection of payment from the ultimate customer. In case of disagreement or non-performance, each vendor and each customer thus deals only with his own national delivery organisation.

However, the difficulties of carrying over the system of international telecommunications payments to computer-services payments should not be minimised. There is likely to be much more equality in inbound and outbound flows in person-to-person communication than in service-centre billings. Even in the case of telecommunications, where some countries have become third-party switching nodes and have thereby built up fairly substantial credits, it has sometimes been difficult to collect. In the presatellite era, Europe-Latin-American traffic sometimes had that problem. Such problems will arise in any billing system, however, and will be more easily manageable in a unified one.

Certainly, thought must be given to the hypothesis that the common carrier, as the only organisation which interfaces with everyone, can perform a very useful function in uniting the three kinds of service bills. Its service as a collection agency is, of course, one for which it will charge.

Security and privacy o f information Maintenance of the security of confidential information, the exclusiveness of proprietary information, the privacy of the individual, or the protection of copyright is difficult under the best of circumstances. The absence of a supernational government authority merely exacerbates these problems in international communication.

That is true for non-computerised in(ormation flows just as much



as for computerised ones. No government can effectively monitor the flow of information across borders and those that try pay by subjecting their society to intolerable oppression. No system of controls can hope to stop the making of a photocopy of a private or copyrighted document. No reasonable border controls can hope to stop the transport of such a piece of paper through the post. The only point at which law enforcement has even a chance of success in this domain is in the checking of organised systematic abuse or in obtaining retribution after the fact when substantial harm has been done.

This is also true for computerised information flows. People will obtain items to which they are not entitled. To seek a total solution to that problem is quixotic. It is useful, however, to consider how far it is possible to deal with organised violations of the laws of one country by computer operations based in another, how far retribution can be arranged for cases in which the harm is large enough to justify it, and perhaps also whether some of our present legal concepts are not obsolete.

The third of these issues (whether, for example, our notion of copyright is not in need of drastic revision in an era of decentralised electronic and electrostatic copying) is one that goes far beyond the frame of reference of this article, and only the former two issues are discussed here.

For those flows that originate or terminate on the lines of a national common carrier, there is clearly the technical possibility of acting against organised abuse. If, for example, a business service were to set itself up in a country that was not signatory to the international copyright convention and proceeded to steal data from high-priced copyrighted business services, it would be possible to act against reception of its telephone or telex number or that of any interface computer that accepted its input.

The wheels of preventive justice grind slowly and inefficiently, so provision for damage suits after the fact is also important. To make such protections feasible might in some instances require international conventions on the model of the international copyright convention, but adapted to cover some of the new issues of data rights. Perhaps the OECD or the World Intellectual Property Organization will initiate a discussion of what the contents of such conventions should be. In that case, several lessons from international copyright experience should be borne in mind:

is For example, a credit bureau in country A that tried to keep files on citizens of country B could be sued if it did not adhere to the protections of privacy main- tained by country A for its own citizens.

It would take at least 5 to 10 years to work out such a convention. The issues are detailed and thorny, and national interests conflict. It would be premature to lay out dog- matic notions from the start as to what the principles should be. These need to be explored in the light of emerging experience. In general, a convention cannot impose uniform practices on countries or press them to practices much stricter than they are ready to accept for themselves domestically. What a convention can do is to create comity between countries and allow to foreigners the same protections that the law of the land allows to citizens. This would prevent a. foreign country from harbouring across-the-border activities that would violate its own laws if addressed to domestic users? 9



• Perhaps nations might agree to allow court action against businesses whose primary purpose was to carry on commercial activities by transborder transfer of information into another country in which that commercial activity would be illegal. To extend this principle to incidental activities of firms or to non- commercial dissemination of information for scientific and idealistic purposes would certainly not be agreed to by the community of nations. Such far-reaching restrictions would constitute an extra-territorial extension of the law of the receiving country into the sending country, and that would clearly not be accepted.

• The main results of a convention, if one could be agreed to, would not be to produce many suits for damages. Such suits would undoubtedly be expensive to bring and hard to win. It would serve rather to define some rules of the game which reputable companies would understand and would accept out of enlightened self-interest. 2°

With a convention or without it, the main protection of countries against violation of information rights carried out from abroad is the ability of countries to act against systematic abuse by controlling their end of the transmission net. Perhaps we should worry more about the inclination of countries to use that power arbitrarily in such fashion that the world will lose some of the benefits of international computer communication than we should worry about their being unable to protect themselves adequately by their sovereign police power.

zo Multinational companies who want to continue doing business in a variety of fields and in many countries have a strong incentive to be considered good citizens by the countries in which they operate. They are likely to be guided by agreed procedural conventions. As with copyright violation, small fly-by-night operators are likely to be the main problem. 21 P.A. In te rnat iona l Managemen t Consultants and Quantam Science Corporation. Eurodata, Amsterdam, 1974.

Sunk investments

Whatever rationalisations in the name of privacy or property rights are to be offered for regulating international computer communication, the real reason is usually a desire by established institutions to protect themselves from competition and change. Every communication carrier is fond of explaining that it intends to move into the future at a measured pace such that its present plant and service to the public will not be disrupted. In principle, no one can argue with the claim that some rate of change lower than the fastest possible will optimise use of scarce resources, including capital, serve the public best, and lay solid foundations for long-term growth. The problem is that these valid generalisations also serve well to rationalise lack of imagination and progress.

Fortunately competition has its inexorable logic. The 1971-72 Eurodata Study 21 recommended forcefully that the PTTs should rapidly introduce public data networks, for if they did not do so others would. So too, international competition in data services will not die. Those countries that try to protect themselves from it will find that other countries are gaining advantages in productivity and economy by means of computer telecommuncation. For their own advantage they will need to lower the bars. What country will want to deny itself access to valuable data bases, or to meteorological or resource information? Once the Pandora's box of technological competition is opened, each country would be well advised to move fast to participate as an efficient user and as a producer of international data communication.



National interests The barriers to the growth of international computer communications described above are problems that concern specialists. A different problem is most salient to laymen, and particularly to politicians and diplomats. That problem is a nationalistic fear of foreign data flows.

The fear is a carry-over from concern about cultural intrusion by foreign mass media, a realm where the fears have some basis. A mass- media item comes in fixed form, produced in one country and then often distributed elsewhere without reference to the cultural values or local needs of the receiver.

An interactive data retrieval or person-to-person message is, of course, quite different. It is more like a telephone call. No one seems to be upset about international telephone calls in the way that some have been about the international flow of news, the international flow of films or television, or direct satellite broadcasting. The reason is clear. A telephone conversation is an interactive two-way process. Both parties want it, both provide input, and each adapts to the other. It is cultural interaction, not cultural imperialism.

Most interactive computer communications are like telephone calls. An information-retrieval request is initiated by the receiver. Input is more nearly symmetrical than in the case of the mass media. Any research unit makes its contribution to the world's knowledge. Nonetheless, there are imbalances and those cause discontent. Three fears are expressed:

• That the world faces a growing gap between the data-rich nations and the data-poor ones.

• That the balance of payments will flow unevenly increasingly in favour of the data-rich.

• That the sovereign control of their own destiny will be impinged if data operators, particularly multinational corporations, can create data sanctuaries abroad.

z= K. Deutsch, "Shifts in the balance of commun ica t ions f lows' , Public Opinion Quarterly, Vo120, No 1, pp 1 4 3 - 1 6 0 . 2a If an oil f ield is deve loped in count ry A, its cus tomers in o ther countr ies become s igni f icant ly dependent on it. If super- p o w e r B sells jet f ighters to a deve lop ing country, the lat ter becomes signi f icant ly dependen t on B for t ra in ing and parts. If a fore ign investor opens an industr ia l p lant in count ry C, there wi l l be a cont inu ing re lat ionship for many years.

Data-rich v data-poor. There is no doubt that in the short-term those who first develop data facilities gain on those who follow. Those who have not developed adequate data and computing resources may have to use them where they exist by means of telecommunication. The important question is whether that is a self-perpetuating situation or a self-correcting one: the evidence is quite strong that it is not self- perpetuating.

Deutsch has analysed international and domestic mail flows, scientific journals, and scientific citations. 22 He found that the proportion of foreign material declined with the maturation of the system. Originally development would take place in one or a few locations. In the rest of the world in consequence there would be much interaction with those centres. Gradually, however, local businesses, or research centres, or journals were founded and people interacted more with others who were conveniently close to them. Contrary to the standard clich~ about the world growing smaller, international interaction as a proportion of all interaction declined with time in maturing fields.

There are, however, counter-examples: cases where foreign dependence acquires a self-perpetuating character. That tends to be so in highly capitalised activities, not in the kind of intellectual activity that Deutsch was talking about. 23



In short, one must distinguish the developmental pattern that follows on different kinds of international relationships. Examples of quite different intenational patterns are offered by agriculture, extractive investments, industry, and intellectual activities. Foreign investments in agriculture, whether by settlers or by creation of a plantation system, have profound social effects usually resulting in more or less violent intergroup conflicts because so many thousands or millions of ordinary people are directly affected in their whole way of life. Investments in extractive industries are usually seen by the local people as particularly exploitative because a few local facilities are built up, and so the end of the process is often expropriation or nationalisation. Investment in heavy manufacturing is much more favourabte to development, but also has the partially self-perpetuating character noted above. The intrusion of service and intellectual activities has a quite different effect because they are labour-intensive and the initial practitioners have no way of keeping their monopoly.

If technicians in a less developed country are trained to operate on a modern computer from a remote terminal, gradually programmers will be trained and analysts will learn to use the computer. Soon they will be doing their own input and developing their own data bases. In short, the main barrier to entering the game is trained workers and access to a machine. Remote access provides both at an early stage. Soon minis and then larger computers will follow, once the skilled personnel exists. Telecomputing accelerates, rather than slows down, the development of computing in the LDCs.

There is an element of the situation that is less flexible, less a function of personnel training and more a function of fixed capital investment. In the past the computer itself might have seemed a massive capital item that LDCs could not easily support. In this day of powerful minis that is no longer a consideration. True, very large operations may be done by remote computing to take advantage of facilities the LDC does not have. But even that is a useful learning experience by which some computer technicians obtain skills that they will use on their next generation of maxi-minis.

It is not the need for capital investment in large computers that checks the spread of independent computer activities to the LDCs. More important in that respect are data bases. Putting together a listing of all the physics articles published in the past decade is a massive job and when someone has done it once, it is not sensible to do it a second time. It is thus partly true that those countries that gain a lead in data-base publishing are likely ~o keep it for some time. Nonetheless data-base publishing is still in its infancy. There is still vast opportunity for countries to take it up, and clearly many will. Also, as mentioned above, some data bases are inherently regional or national in their content. Nonetheless, for this one kind of international computer communication (information retrieval from data bases), the general conclusion that a lead in international computer communication is not self-perpetuating, but rather self- eroding, should perhaps be qualified.

Balance o f payments. There is another kind of remote computer access that worries advanced industrial countries like Canada and the UK. That worry is that the countries whose entrepreneurs develop the most efficient computer service centres and value-added networks will siphon off service-bureau type work from domestic computer centres.



That will mean a foreign exchange loss and less opportunity for building up local computing capability.

One response to such a loss of business is the one urged by the Eurodata study. 24 A foreign competitor is likely to consist of a private dedicated network running from the user's terminal to the entrepreneur's own computer in his home country. If the common carrier acts vigorously to create a public all-point network at home, the customer will find himself with many choices of vendors of computer services in his home country. A foreign vendor will face more competition.

The more traditional protectionist response to the same problem is either to prohibit buying computer services abroad or to impose a tariff, in the case of communications in the form of special high rates on the international lines, z~ The argument against such protectionism is simply the traditional argument against protectionism in general. Such a policy protects inefficiency, removes incentives to self- improvement, penalises consumers, and lowers the gross national product. These points have become part of the accepted philosophy in the Atlantic community in the last couple of decades.

Against these considerations there is always the national-defence argument and the infant-industry argument. It may be hoped by a government that giving the local computer centres a few years of favoured treatment will allow them to achieve competitive levels of quality. For reasons already expounded, the hope seems to be futile and misguided in this application. The chances of raising the technical skills and imagination of computer specialists in a country seem far greater if they are an integral part of the world's most sophisticated computing via networking, than if they are shut off into a rather pedestrian non-competitive domestic situation. One may speculate that the current UK policy is more likely to reduce the role of the u K and lose foreign exchange earnings in the Western computing community rather than to enhance them.

24 Eurodata Study, 1974, op cit. 25The British have recently done this. They require GPO approval of all software offered over the Tymshare company's Tymnet and prohibit the use of that network to access non-Tymshare-owned computers except on the condition of the payment of a very high surcharge. Tymnet has not accepted this arrangement, so British researchers can access the many data bases distributed by Tymnet only by long-distance telephone call to Tymnet's Paris node, at greatly increased cost. Medical students would be in the same position for use of Tymnet's CAI pro- gramme. 2~ Indeed, there is a recent example: the data tape from an interview study of drug abuse in the USA was shipped for storage to Canada so that it could not be sub- poenaed by US law-en fo rcement authorities.

Sovereignty. A final fear is that international computer-communication networks can defeat the sovereign policies of a nation by providing data sanctuaries abroad. Clearly, there are such things as sanctuaries; people do move activities of a controversial nature to a place where they are not threatened. People leave countries where they could be endangered for countries where they are safe. Thus one can conceive of motives for keeping data in one country rather than another. 26

But does any of this represent a serious threat to national sovereignty? Few of us would want a world where people could not escape the more erratic whims and impositions of governments by moving to another jurisdiction. This could be viewed as a problem only if the mobility were on such a scale that it threatened the very ability of a government to govern.

There seems to be no such threat from the flow of data. Two threats are occasionally cited. One of these concerns earth resource data. In the UN in recent debates the spectre has been raised that a few countries have the capability of observing by satellite the resources of other lands and then use that information to bid for development concessions or in bargaining on the world food market. While the advantages to be won would usually fall far short of destroying sovereignty, there are clear possibilities of taking



advantage of such knowledge. That is why the USA adopted a policy of total public access to all ERTS data. The problem, if there is one, is not the right to access, but the fact that the country scanned cannot physically receive all the data it may properly want quickly or completely enough to use it well. A high-speed international data network would help, not hurt.

The other fear expressed is that large multinational corporations might keep data on the market in a certain country, or on operations in that country, in a different country to prevent the government of the first from effectively regulating them. Once again it would be naive not to surmise that occasionally a company may spirit out an embarrassing piece of paper to another jurisdiction, just as it may sometimes burn one, but the notion that data can systematically be denied to the host country by a multinational to a point at which the sovereignty of the host is threatened seems quite wrong. A multinational does business in a host country by the permission and at the sufferance of the host. Nothing prevents any government from laying down any levy it wishes on data that must be reported, nor is it prevented from acquiring whatever documentation of the sources of the data it wants. The multinational has little choice but to comply if it wishes to stay and do business. It makes little difference in which jurisdiction the data are located. They must be produced. Once again, the presence of international computer communication would help rather than hinder the government in compelling the production of data.

Indeed, the only kind of data sanctuary that might present real problems to any firmly resolved government is a sanctuary against the type of privacy laws that many governments are now adopting. Restricting the kind of credit-range information a credit bureau might keep could result in its escape to another jurisdiction where such restriction would not be imposed. In the instance of privacy legislation the government is telling the private organisation that it may not keep certain information, even stored elsewhere where it is legal. This is a difficult requirement to enforce. That limitation on the effectiveness of government regulation, however, is hardly a threat to national sovereignty.

Considered objectively, national concerns about a threat to sovereignty from computer communication seem to be misguided and misplaced. However, as long as that issue is a concern among politicians, those who work at making computer communication a reality for the benefit of mankind must help to put it in perspective.


Documents

International aspects of computer communications