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Throughout the pacific region, politicians and entrepreneurs are puzzling
over how best to respond to US Vice-President Al Gore’s advocacy of a National
Information Infrastructure. Government committees fret about national security
and cultural issues, while businesses ponder the commercial opportunities
in what promises to be an enormous market. But there’s a lot to do in the
region before either side can make much progress.

As far as networking goes, the Pacific nations today look very much
as the US did five years ago. Then, networkers argued that academic users
would be the key to future growth. As it turned out, commercial interests
spurred the network’s expansion in the US. According to the Internet Society,
which brings users together, the Internet doubled in size in 1993 to incorporate
25 000 networks round the world – with three-quarters of that growth coming
from business users. Close to two-thirds of all networks now connected
to the Internet are owned by companies.

By contrast, networks in the Pacific region are still overwhelmingly
academic in character. Countries with the closest ties to the US are the
most active networkers. Australia accounts for the biggest slice by far
of international traffic on the NSFNet, the main route for academics onto
the Internet. Next comes Taiwan, which boasts a large community of US-educated
researchers. It sends and receives more megabytes per month than Japan,
which has six times the population.

But neither Australia nor Taiwan has many business networkers. The Australian
government is talking of setting up its own information infrastructure,
but without saying what priority it will be given. When Microsoft chairman
Bill Gates met Prime Minister Paul Keating in Canberra early this year,
Gates praised his host’s understanding of networking issues. Keating’s techno-nous
came as a surprise to Australia’s small band of networking activists. ‘None
of us knew that he knew anything,’ was a typical comment.

In Taiwan, the parliament or Executive Yuan has set up an ad hoc committee
to discuss an information infrastructure for the island. But the committee
was formed only in January and, according to one of its 12 members, discussions
are still at a very early stage.

Singapore is the country in the region that has been the most attuned
to the maturing of the information age. In 1991, its National Computer Board
came up with an all-embracing project called IT2000: Vision of an Intelligent
Island. The project’s major thrust was a national information infrastructure
along the lines proposed in the US by Vice-President Al Gore. Singapore
is already one of the most networked nations in the world. There are more
than a thousand bulletin boards, mostly run by individual enthusiasts, and
many local business transactions are done electronically via TradeNet and
its many derivatives such as MediNet and LawNet. PortNet, the island’s port
management system, has made Singapore one of the world’s most efficient
entrepots.

Nevertheless, most data traffic from Singapore onto the Internet, via
a network called Technet, is concerned with R&D and education, as it
is elsewhere in the region. The island remains a deeply paternalistic society
whose government does everything in its power to restrict the influx of
ideas and information that it deems subversive or corrupting. Unrestricted
Internet access could present a threat to Singapore’s political and cultural
status quo, commentators point out.

Among them is science fiction writer William Gibson, a recent visitor
to the island. ‘How will a society founded on (paternal) guidance cope with
the wilds of X-rated cyberspace?’ Gibson wondered in the American magazine
WIRED. ‘They expect that whole highways of data will flow through their
city. Yet they also seem to expect that this won’t affect them.’

China is even more nervous about what it sees as the potential threat
the Internet could pose for the country’s national security. In February,
the Peking government issued rules that charge the Ministry of Public Security
with supervising computer information networks. All international network
activity must be registered with this ministry.

But do the authorities in China have the power to prevent such activity
from spreading? Commercial Internet services began in Hong Kong last year,
and Bob Coggeshall of HK SuperNet, one of the colony’s two service providers,
says they are growing fast. The Chinese government already knows how difficult
it is to prevent its citizens from dialling up offshore networks. Peking
has prohibited betting via the huge and sophisticated computer system run
by the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, but the ban has been totally ineffective.

Apart from Hong Kong, Japan is the only Pacific country that uses the
Internet for business. But petty squabbles between service providers and
the Japanese government are hampering the spread of access. The National
Centre for Science Information Systems (NACSIS), the organisation designated
by the government to provide Internet access to Japan’s research and education
community, adopted an unpopular technology, then tried to ram it down the
throats of reluctant users.

Meanwhile, a group of young researchers based at Keio University established
a rival network. Based on standard Internet protocols, this network quickly
proved popular and became highly successful. It was funded mostly by companies
whose researchers wanted Internet access. Demands on the network grew, getting
in the way of research, so a company, called Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ),
was formed to meet them.

NACSIS saw the researchers’ initiative as an attempt to usurp the national
centre’s rightful position, even though IIJ has offered to provide network
services to Japanese universities. Under pressure from NACSIS, Japan’s Ministry
of Posts and Telecommunications has denied IIJ the licence it needs to
provide commercial international Internet services.

The unexpected result of the brouhaha, which has dragged on for several
months, is that Japan’s first commercial Internet service providers are
both American. One is a subsidiary of AT&T, which by historical accident
happens to have the right sort of licence. The other is a subsidiary of
the leading US Internet service provider, Performance Systems International.

PSI’s chief technical officer, Martin Schoffstall, says that he expects
the Japanese market for network access to expand rapidly. Schoffstall reasons
that the Japanese can take the best technology, which the US has had to
develop for itself, and start with that ‘without having to go down the learning
³¦³Ü°ù±¹±ð’.

Another American who expects the Internet to spread rapidly in Japan
is Carl Malamud, author of the ‘technical travelogue’ Exploring the Internet,
published last year by Prentice-Hall. While Japan has relatively little
connectivity by US standards, he argues that it would be unwise to underestimate
the infrastructure the Japanese have built, ‘particularly the 400 or so
trained network engineers who really know the Internet’.

The explosion of interest in the Internet has caught Japan’s government
off guard. Unlike their US counterparts, Japanese bureaucrats have virtually
no experience in using computer networks. What they do know how to do, though,
is fight for funds. Since last April, the ministries of posts and telecommunications,
international trade and industry, and education, science and culture, have
all been involved in an unseemly (but not untypical) struggle over who gets
control of building Japan’s version of the national information infrastructure.
In its most ambitious version, this would be a $400 billion project that
would lay optical fibre to every Japanese office, school and home by 2015.

Thus far, however, all the bureaucrats have been able to agree on is
the construction of a high-capacity network connecting the research laboratories
belonging to the various ministries. This would cost between $40 and $50
million over the next three years.

What entrepreneurs like PSI and established players like Nippon Telegraph
and Telephone want from the government is as little interference as possible.
Observers of the country find it hard to imagine their wish being granted.
Japanese bureaucrats can rarely resist the urge to meddle.