A Geodesic Information Infrastructure:
		Lessons from Restructuring the Internet 

	A lecture for the International Communication Association 1995
			Albuquerque, NM


			Willard Uncapher
			Dept. of Radio-TV-Film
			University of Texas at Austin
			paradox@actlab.rtf.utexas.edu

	Abstract:

	The following paper examines the geometry of the information
networks, suggesting that instead of 'highways' we should think of them
as increasingly geodesic structures.  Going beyond Huber's report to the
U.S. Justice Dept. on how the geodesic telecommunications network
undermined traditional policy frameworks, the current article examines
how changes in the intelligence of switches should be seen in a broader
historical and policy framework.  It concentrates on examining the
changes in the organization of the Internet, and concludes by raising
the issues of unbundling, bypass, access, and interface for those
concerned about community, economic, and political development.

### 

		A Geodesic Information Infrastructure: 
		Lessons from Restructuring the Internet

			An Information Highway?

	Metaphors have great power to organize our thinking, and the
metaphor of the information highway has been no exception.  Certainly,
it has helped to focus popular debate about the ongoing fusion of the
information, telecommunications, and entertainment industries, providing
easily comprehended images with which to ask questions about subsidy,
development, privacy, and so on.  We can pose the question of 'access'
in terms of 'how rapid will the on and off ramps to this (super)highway
be' or the question of 'subsidy' in terms of 'whether we need a public
works project, a state sponsored highway or perhaps private toll roads.'
It is a sign of a good metaphor that it can be so fecund as to help
organize such a diversity of issues, and the importance of making these
issues as comprehensible as possible to the general public in order to
encourage debate and participation should not be underestimated.

	Still, sooner or later, as the reality of what the metaphor
describes begins to escape the confines of old conceptions, begins to
take on a new life- horseless carriage, wireless telegraph- so the
political and historical assumptions implicit in the old metaphors
surface.  If the present essay works to reconsider the vision of an
'information highway' it is not simply because overuse of this highway
metaphor has dulled more precise analysis of the issues of information
exchange, access, and integration, but because we need to draw back to
ask what this metaphor is telling us.  We are reaching a point where
this metaphor is hiding more than it reveals, to a point where,
enantiomorphically, the limitations and biases of the metaphor are
becoming informative in a new and unexpected way.  The terms 'horseless
carriage' (car) and 'wireless telegraph' (radio) should remind us not
simply how quaint the world once was, or how old metaphors might blind
innovators to implications of their creations, but of the importance of
recognizing that the social world of the 'car' or the 'radio' might be
have been presaged by the horse's movement or the telegraph's
re-distribution of content and power.

	Highways are about hierarchies.  Some roads are bigger and
faster.  Some are narrow and can't carry heavy loads or fast traffic.
We would not want an 18 wheeler truck heading down local streets at 65
miles per hour (100 km/h) for fear that the truck would damage the
streets and the local life therein.  Neither would we want to see local
street life, from the chatting of neighbors to teaching children how to
ride bikes transposed to an interstate highway.  Looking at data
networks in terms of highways gets most of us thinking in these terms.
Near by, there is the twisted pair, that slenderest of telephone cables
emerging from a house like a small country lane, like a brook not far
from its spring.  And then, far from here, we know there must be the
faster, high speed networks, transporting vast amounts of data from one
region to another wherein roaring torrents flow.  These big highways are
getting faster yet.  The federally funded High Performance Computing and
Communication (HPCC) Network project promises even higher speed networks
than are currently available to existing 'backbones' (NCO 1993). That
far off world of massive data flows seems enwrapped in the mystery of
complex network protocols and hardware, probably best left in the hands
of the giant firms and governmental agencies

	And yet this notion of the hierarchy, of the gradual, but
measured ascent in capacity is quietly being undermined.  In the
topology of the future, 'highways' can mysteriously appear in the center
of the most residential of areas and yet be almost unknown by the
neighbors.  Homes themselves can increasingly serve to redirect
information traffic by themselves: all one needs is the intelligence of
a computer and incoming electronic message, images, and data can be
stored, evaluated, interacted with, or sent elsewhere.  The messages or
services on a home located bulletin board system may have originated on
many systems, with the one bulletin board simply coordinating the flow
of access and discussion.  Mysteriously, from the perspective of the
movement of media products, the 'home' or 'office' by the side of the
highway and the highway itself have begun to merge.  The material world
remains bound by copper and glass strands and by paved and unpaved
roadways whether through land, air, or sea.  The material world can
still be characterized by production and extraction companies vying with
one another based on economies of scale. Yet the movement and
manipulation of the information upon which both the largest companies
and most powerless consumers depend, and around which they are
increasingly organized, is becoming increasingly volatile, ambiguous and
appears to be changing the nature of companies and consumers.  What is
happening?

	The structure of the mediascape is becoming increasingly
geodesic, a term I will explain at greater lengths in a moment.  For the
nonce, let me note that the term, coined by Buckminster Fuller, famed as
a designer, mathematician, and less well known as an social critic,
speaks to the stability of a system in terms of its multiple,
overlapping redundancies.  With this term he foregrounds the importance
of the endpoint, the vertex, the node, against the line, the path, the
cross-beam.  It is a vision where the world is structured by the
flexibility and durability of where things come together, rather than by
the hierarchy of individuals.  Fuller argued that the geodesic structure
is the most efficient organizational strategy in the known universe,
from the sub microscopic level of the virus to immensely large, stable
structures as well.  A dome, built on geodesic principles is capable of
spanning an entire sports stadium, or even a city.  Some of my readers,
particularly those familiar with telecommunications policy will
anticipate my use of Peter Huber's famous and influential report to the
Anti-trust division of the U.S. Justice Department (1984; 1992),
entitled the Geodesic Network.  I will not disappoint them.  Huber
outlined how innovations and decreases in the costs of switching are
creating a new kind of geodesic competitive market, undermining
traditional switching hierarchies, and the kinds of companies and
regulations established and negotiated in terms of these hierarchies.
Indeed, I will present a quick summary of his arguments later in this
paper.  However, I wish to provide a much overdue extension of these
ideas to examine the ongoing restructuring of the information networks,
taking the Internet as one example.  That I would broaden the
application of geodesics to include the global communications
infrastructure is very much in keeping with Fuller's own analysis of the
relationship of geodesics and stability, of communication/
transportation hierarchies and the nature of power and economic wealth.
Probably unknown to most telecommunications policy analysts, Fuller
spent time as an analyst for Fortune magazine, and wrote a great deal
during his life about the relation of communication structures and the
accumulation and manipulation of wealth.

	Much of the power of the 'information age' lies with the
computer, a device which like some kind of automatic printing press and
staff, works to collect, evaluate, and manipulate data and connections
with ever increasing speed, flexibility, and accuracy.  Computers
continue to reorganize the traffic that courses the old communication
and transportation networks.  But how is this changing the contexts of
surveillance and control, of collective action and knowledge, of
property and virtual being?  The current essay seeks to explore changes
in the geometry of the emerging organization. It is the contention of
this paper that we need to press forward in assessing the implications
of the computer as an organizational tool, both in how they organize
information (such as in assembling music samples), or in how they
transform complex social organizations.  Indeed I would argue that these
organizational aspects are so key to the ongoing transformation of the
mediascape and to the associated transformation in the structures of
power and wealth, that they overwhelm the importance of the increasing
capacity of the links to shuffle things around, whether through twisted
pair, coaxial cable, fiber optic strand, radio or satellite transponder,
or even in material carriers such as truck, train, boat, or plane.  It
is the intelligence of the switching that is driving the 'Communications
Revolution,' and the way these switches work with other switches in
turn, not the vast increases in carrying capacity.

	An exemplary case of geodesic restructuring is the Internet. The
Internet is more than a 'highway of information' linking large and
small.  It had traditionally been a somewhat hierarchically organized
switching structure with profound resemblance to the old switching
hierarchies of AT&T prior to divestiture.  What is happening to this
emerging multi-media and information infrastructure likewise bears
profound similarities to the divestiture environment of AT&T, and to the
kind of geodesic structure that helped to bring this change it.
Surprisingly little has been written about this transformation, and the
current paper hopes to jump into the gap and to provide some much needed
insight.

			Histories of Hierarchies

	One of the fundamental assumptions of this paper is that the
'geometrical' differences between the virtual and material worlds make
for policy differences between these two domains.  In the material
world, great importance is given to what I call center-periphery'
orientation.  I would not be disinclined to invoke the works of the
global historian, Immanuel Wallerstein who has long asserted that
economic 'centers' use communication media and political means to
integrate peripheral economies into their domination, creating a kind of
global division of labor (Wallerstein 1987).  His
centralization/decentralization themes extend the conceptual directions
of media historians such as Harold Innis and James Carey who have
investigated patterns of centralizing control and decentralizing
expansion associated with the historical development of communication
technologies.  The telegraph and its news wire service, for example,
helped to distribute information about the world from central
distribution hubs, even as they facilitated the decentralizing movement
of people and their cultures to new frontiers.  The decentralized
peripheries had to answer to the options and the panoptic knowledge
available to those who dominated the dense core areas (Wallerstein 1990;
Carey 1989).  Economic historian Ferdnand Braudel speaks of a 'hierarchy
of zones' within the world economy: "Every world-economy is a sort of
jigsaw puzzle, a juxtaposition of zones, interconnected, but at
different levels, with the core being advanced, diversified, and urban"
(Braudel 1984:39).

	A key to this older system of control lay in the difficulty of
assembling and interpreting information.  Where one individual or group
has to direct a complex variety of operations, a division of labor and
hierarchy becomes a profound necessity.  Hierarchy is a way of handling
complexity: break down the task into sub-units which (1) can handle the
variety of choices and contingencies of its level, and (2) which can
generate even smaller sub-units when necessary, making use of their
results in turn.  Strategically, this yields a few higher level nodes
which survey and guide the whole.  Since the human mind can handle only
so much complexity, it was bound to create and utilize a topology of
'hierarchy' in an attempt to organize the complex resources and scaled
economies of the material world.  The development of writing, for
example, facilitates ever more complex social systems developed in
conjunction with a more centralized production, storage, and analysis of
information.  A class of scribes or mandarins report to the reigning
'mon-arch' and these scribes and their scholars organize with their own
minds the complex possibilities of the symbolic world, and the material
world to which these symbols allude.  The invention of printing serves
to both break apart many of the old hierarchies, creating more
localized, language oriented divisions, and serving to extend and
'complexify' business strategies even more.  Capitalist hubs like the
Netherlands and Northern Italy, those founding sites of Capitalism with
their stock markets and innovative accounting practices, developed
information technologies and products such as the daily newspaper in the
early 1600s to share information being gathered from (and for) trade
ships and their speculators.

	Printing and mail delivery helped distribute information in such
a way that those with economic power could understand and strategize
more and more of the market volatility from a panoptic core.  The onset
of the electronic revolution developed in two distinct phases. It is the
contention of this article that while a great deal of thought has gone
into the study of the first phase, not as much has gone into the
organizational implications of the second.  The first phase begins with
the perfection of the telegraph during the 1830s, a device which severed
the connection of communication from physical transportation.  No longer
would these two terms mean the same thing  Electricity, and the messages
that it carried could travel at the speed of light, and whomever could
access these telegraph lines in a meaningful way could, to paraphrase
James Madison, master the power that information yields.  While on the
one hand this new communication technology helped to de-centralize
society, allowing those who moved to the frontiers to keep in touch with
the distant urban core, on the other hand the real effect appears to
have been one of increasing centralization and control (c.f. Carey
1989).  Since only a few individuals could afford to gain access to
these new technologies, or could be located near one of the hubs, the
result was one of increasing panoptic control.  Indeed, the rational
management schemes of Frederick Winslow Taylor proposed just after the
turn of the 20th century seems the apotheosis of this method of control
(cf. Beniger 1986).  Individual workers would be 'deskilled' so that
they would be interchangeable in a system of intelligent, rational
organization, strictly managed from observant, calculating, planning
executive.  If every deck hand were to make decisions about where the
boat was to go, it would surely flounder.

	Similarly, news stories spread out over the metallic wires,
carrying the telegraphic notices of distant events and markets.  The
core areas had the greatest variety of information, as well as
hierarchies of information workers to organize it all in a manner
suitable to investment and control.  The remote communities would simply
have to make do with the generalized (mass) information provided by the
core, information that as Henry David Thoreau pointed out in the mid
19th century often held little relevance to empowerment of the local
community, and that in fact seemed primarily to pander to emotions and
to organize a view of the world that prioritized the need for the core
areas.  The inventions of radio, film, and television did little to
change this pattern of organization since they too were biased toward
locating power at the center.  The first phase of the electronic
revolution was one of enhanced but almost invisible control, even if the
popular electronic imagination saw mostly gadgets of improved
interpersonal and ever more entertaining mass communication.

	While the electronic inventions of the telegraph and the
telephone severed the connection of communication from physical
transportation, they served to centralize control because of the limits
of the switches, the endpoints.  Since humans had to be sitting at the
ends of these telegraph and telephone lines, they could interpret and
redirect only so much information.  At the same time, those who were at
the hubs, the higher order endpoints had a panoptic view, with the most
elevated of these hubs yielding views that could help translate into
systems of centralized global control.  The movement of material objects
still had to course along accustomed pathways, subject to the logic of
centralization, scaled economy, and potentially coercive control.
Highway systems were built, for train, carriage or later car, but these
were constructed to great extent as part of the logic of centralized
power somewhere.  Complicated highway systems are usually not developed
by local communities (alone) but as part of larger schemes of military
and economic control.  Local communities did support the development of
highways, such as in the case of early toll roads, to take advantage of
markets and opportunities coming from beyond the horizon.  However, they
were generally funded and built by the military and calculating agents
of the larger scale economy, and it is no surprise that so much of the
interstate highway money in the United States came from military funds
based on the justification that we needed to move troops from place to
places rapidly as part and parcel of our own defense.  Highways serve to
move products rapidly from one sector, one site of production, to
another site of manufacture or exchange, whether it is an 'electronic'
highway, or one of concrete and macadam. The 'information highway' in
this context represents an avenue for cyberspatial early birds who need
to move the bits and bytes around quickly and efficiently, extending the
control across virtual communities and into material opportunities.
Some might argue that the logic of the 'information highway' is one of
expanding and extending centralized control into the discordant and ever
localized communities of production and exchange.

	Out of this 'center-periphery' outlook two strategies emerge for
media reformers, critics, and renegades.  On the one hand engaged social
reformers might look to change the distribution of information at the
various centers, introduce some popular elements upstream into the core
distributors.  In the case of cable television distribution, activists
sought to make public and educational access channels (PEGs) available.
In the case of newspapers distribution, activists sought to at least
make sure that the major newspapers were responsive to a variety of
views, or else to set up alternative newspapers.  Where access was
limited, as in the case of cable content, means to subsidize public
access, the distribution of essential and diversified information were
sought.  Critical scholars, such as Adorno and Horkeimer seem to
romanticize the power of the mass media even as they decry the culture
of its owners.  One has the sense that according to many of these
critical philosophers, that in a better world enlightened
'Philosopher-Kings' would be able to grab the public bull horn from a
key, central site, and speak to all those in their vicinity, encouraging
them to speak openly to one another.  If only the mass could be unified
and made aware of their own class interests, free of the co-option of
false consciousness.  No wonder a critical theorist like Habermas
decries the decline of the public sphere, what others have called the
tragedy of the commons.  The mass media, in any traditional sense, is
disappearing, losing their universal characteristics of reaching
everyone.  Certainly some key outlets remain, but many might elect not
to look at the few remaining 'general' media, choosing a more
personalized media.

	On the other hand, more alienated dissidents might seek to move
as far to the 'peripheries' as possible, away from the core, to
disappear into what Hakim Bey has called the "Temporary Autonomous
Zones" (TAZ), zones of temporary freedom and experimentation (Bey 1991).
Although the geophysical world now exists under the scrutiny of
satellites, still within the fractal folds of the city, hidden in the
approximate mappings of surveillance and control, are communities of
freedom, folded in and out of site/sight.  Disbanded when discovered or
overwhelmed, they will perhaps regroup somewhere else.  These
communities do not seek to establish new common definitions and
frameworks for transforming the control of cross subsidies and physical
power.  Their resistance or 'rebellion' to use Camus' terms, is
primarily to create sites of heterogeneity and exploration beyond the
temporal and symbolic logic of States, hidden in fractal anarchism.
According to Bey, such communities have existed throughout history but
because they are not the ones who write the official accounts, they
rarely appear as more than a footnote.  Currently, several historians
are seeking to rediscover some of these (almost) hidden histories, such
as those of the Pirate utopian community experiments in places like
Nassau, or of the frontier 'tri-racial isolate communities' (African,
European, Native American) created by 'cultural' refugees from the
Colonial America is taking on new life (cf.  Sakolsky & Koehnline 1993).
Bey and others who study the TAZ recognize the possibilities for
creating TAZ using electronic networks.  'Webs' and 'Counter-Nets,'
proto and counter cultural outposts, bound by affinity and shared
differences develop within our gaze yet invisible to our sight/site.

	If the centuries of social structures constructed and dominated
by mass media are coming to an end, what it taking its place?  It would
seem logical that the changing media landscape would first be
conceptualized in terms of the older media organizations, especially as
developed to assess mass mediated or oral, interpersonal societies.
Media and cultural theorists are scrambling to theorize the nature of
this 'post-mass society' whose onset has occurred so suddenly (cf.
Neuman 1991).  Traditional mass media theorists have tended to look to
emerging networks in terms of centralized control, in terms of the
'political economy of private information' for example.  These theorists
do not really believe that the intelligence of the switches have done
more than give more power to the hubs, now perhaps occulted within
layers of invisible electronic social and access hierarchy.  The
assumption is that the cryptography programs will be good enough and
complete enough to prop up the older views and theories of social
control.  Interpersonal theorists, trained by exploring the nature of
orality, rhetoric, and personal relationships have seen in the new
landscape ways to explore even more mediated speech, looking to
parasocial relationships with media constructed others not simply in
mass media, but in the online environment, to sociality in the virtual
community.  While traditional theories continue to generate the
questions and studies, something about this new multiply-mediated,
increasingly global system seems to be eluding them.  While I will have
to defer an analysis of how we might ask a new set of questions
(Uncapher 1994a), for now I would assert that we have to consider the
current changes in the context of a media history which includes more
than the last 100 years, that we indeed must place the ongoing
transformations of par with revolutions associated with orality,
writing, and mass communication.

	The new is conceptualized with the concepts of old.  Radio was
first thought of as a wireless telegraph, because its implication for
broadcast to a mass audience was unforeseen.  The telephone was simply
'Bell's plaything' and the patent right to the invention were turned
down by Western Union Telegraph since the notion of wiring individual
homes with the new invention was unforeseen or considered extravagant.
What is happening to our media structures is more profound than can be
captured by thinking of the ongoing cultural change as 'narrow-casting
replacing broadcasting.'  We see in the mirror of cyberspace strange
resemblences to the world we leave behind, and we take with us our
notion of Euclidean geometry where perhaps we should take out our books
on mathematical topology with theories and lemmas of multi-dimensional
mappings.  We invoke online communities to help reinvigorate our
geophysical communities, and from the increased access to and by
consumers to restrategize corporate futures.  However, ,there is a
strange logic in this online world, and as we use cyberspace to
reconstitute ourselves, it subtly and perhaps irrevocably is changing
us.

		A New Geometry of Telecommunications

	The notion that the computer and digital media are changing the
very pathways by which communication systems are structured and
undermining traditional hierarchies, has of course been in the eye of
telecommunication policy makers for a number of years now.  Peter Huber,
writing his now famous summary of the evolution of the
telecommunications infrastructure for the US. Justice Department, spoke
of the overall design of this new topology, of this new science of
mapping and connectedness, as a 'geodesic network' (Huber 1978).
Seeking to articulate the changing contexts for regulations and market
competition in US telephony after the AT&T divestiture, he analyzed the
telecommunications infrastructure into three essential components: (1)
lines, (2) switches/nodes, and (3) an overarching regulatory structure.
When the cost of lines was low and the cost of switching high, the
optimal organizational topology was to make use of a switching
hierarchy, and in the case of the U.S. telecommunications
infrastructure, a 5 tier hierarchy of switches, with the smaller class 5
switch huddled down at the local level, all the way up to the
stratospheric class 1 mega-switch capable of organizing and moving vast
amounts of data between networks.

	In this kind of hierarchical system, data would be moved only to
the most powerful switches necessary.  When the cost of switching came
down, and the comparative cost of the lines and transmission went up,
the optimal topology was to have the information take the shortest route
possible, and to make use of the intelligence of the switches to find
that route.  In fact these switches were nothing more than computers,
and computers nothing more than switches.  Was it any wonder that AT&T
developed the transistor, and laid the foundation for integrated
circuits?  Rather than have a telephone operator sit and physically pull
plugs on a giant board as was done up to the 1920s, the telephone
companies began to develop automatic switches (so the caller need only
dial the telephone number to tell the switch how to operate).  The
public was instructed how to dial directly, using buttons on their new
phones rather than simply telling a living operator who they wanted to
talk with.  Many users felt this made the telephone experience cold
indeed, a reaction not unlike the early resistance to automatic cash
machines (ATM's).  The caller used a rotary device to tell a remote
machines how to operate and what  connections had to be made. This
activity was integrated into a complex hierarchical system whereby ever
more complex 'negotiation' between the 'caller' and networks of switches
was automatically organized.  Along side these developments the
government's need to develop advanced calculating machines (for
cryptography, demographic accounting, and research), and the perfection
of von Neuman's central processing 'CPU' architecture crystallized into
a new generation of switches, which is to say a universal 'computer.'

	With the development of packet switching during the 1960s,
individual switches within the network began to decide almost for
themselves how to send messages, breaking them into small 'packets' with
individual addresses, sending them across optimal, ever changing
pathways to a final destination where all the packets would be
automatically re-assembled.  If there was a mistake in transmission, if
a packet was missing or garbled, then the switches were powerful enough
to call back through the networks to ask for the information to be
resent.  The result was a vast increase in network capacity, and a new
flexibility.  As the military who had funded much of this researched had
hoped, the telecommunications network had developed so that if some
switch went out, say by a catastrophe of war or sabotage, then the
information traffic would automatically be routed around it.  Traffic
need only go over the temporarily open line, and not have to keep open a
single link from source to destination.  However, this new transmission
method not only made the telecommunications network much more efficient
and more resilient to network damage, it also began the process of
'flattening out' the hierarchies of the network, allowing for new
pathways to developed, perhaps by MCI, perhaps by Sprint, without
regards to the rest of the network.  Rather than organizing a hierarchy
of switches, the networking strategies increasingly concerned themselves
with the ways to switch packets along automatically discerned, optimal
path in the shortest amount of time possible.

	Huber called this new topology 'geodesic,' using the term of
designer and mathematician Buckminster Fuller to describe how the
strength of the system could be achieved not through structural
hierarchies, but as the sum of the constant play of strengths and
resiliancies (or 'tensegrity') of the many interconnections forming the
whole (cf. Fuller 1975:373-431; 1979:165-186).  Buckminster Fuller
showed that the more structural elements there were to the geodesic
structure, the stronger it was.  Structures that were based on
hierarchical designs are fundamentally unstable since the failure of any
supporting structure would compromise the integrity of the whole.  Such
systems, such as an ordinary house, had to be built with a great number
of redundancies, such as struts and cross beams, to compensate for
structural shortcomings, and even still such buildings eventually were
ruined by time and entropy. It is no wonder the foundations of
traditional houses and other such buildings have to be so strong.  A
crack in the foundations can mean the collapse of the house.  The
epitome of a geodesic structure, however, is of course the geodesic
dome, a dome which has a redundancy built into every link so that it can
maintain its overall integrity even as it loses many of its component
parts.  Jay Baldwin who helped build Fuller's own geodesic dome on his
island in Maine told me that a key problem had been to secure the dome
to the ground.  Since the dome itself was so sound it could be lifted up
and toppled by strong New England winds, like a sail in the wind
(Baldwin 1991).  Fuller spent much of his life demonstrating that this
kind of geometry was the basis of natural structural integrity and
stability, from the virus to interplanetary structures (much as
fractals, non-linear iteration, and principles of chaos now appear to be
at the basis of natural growth).  The human world is littered with the
ruins of hierarchical buildings and structures, tumbled down by their
own weight.

	Huber drew on Fuller's legacy for his telecommunications policy
study, drawing attention to the fact that each of the nodes, the
end-points of the telecommunication network might turn out a link to
somewhere else in the network.  Like a magical house where entering a
closet leads one into a bed room far away, so the terminal nodes might
be connected to their own networks.  The actual ends of the
telecommunications networks were becoming fogged in uncertainty.  End
users could hook a computer up to their telephone line, set up an
electronic bulletin board, and then actively coordinate and switch
information (stored or synchronous (chat) conversations, data, images,
etc.) themselves.  End users could set up their own local
telecommunications network for their organization.  As the intelligence
of the network spread out during the late 60s and 1970s from the center,
from the massive class 1 switches out to the frontier of ever more
intelligent 'desktop' computers and other equipment, so the regulatory
structures based on a centralized, hierarchical
command-control-communicate overview grew obsolete and overly
restrictive.  Bypass became almost a certainty as pathways out from and
back into network could be established that circumvented established
regulatory conventions.

	The telephone companies of old, those corporate structures that
served to organize all the connectivity and flow were beginning to
disappear into the world of their lines and switches they had set up.
Complex systems of interconnection began to allow potential competitors
to AT&T such as MCI and Sprint the ability to provide additional lines
and switches at more competitive rates to users, and often with services
that AT&T had not yet developed or brought to the market.  AT&T
meanwhile chafed under the increasingly outmoded regulatory regime,
especially with its attempt to make distinctions between basic services
and 'enhanced services,' with its many line of business restrictions.
The rise of telephone companies like MCI was made viable not because
they intended to duplicate the entire AT&T network, but because with the
shift to more intelligent switches, and with the switches themselves
being more decentralized and distributed throughout the network,
interconnection became possible, even preferable.  The new telephone
companies were made possible because with the cost of switches falling
and the comparative cost of lines and transmission rising, new more
specialized links within the overall telecommunications structure could
be attempted.  As the old virtual hierarchies gave way to the
increasingly geodesic flattening, so new entrants appeared to strengthen
the tensegrity of the overall stately, informational dome of an
otherworldly Xanadu.

	A Geodesic Information Infrastructure: The Internet

	Surprisingly, little work has been done to extend Huber's notion
of the geodesic telecommunications structure to that of a more
generalized notion of a geodesic information structure, and it is
therefor no surprise that architects of shared virtual community spaces
are likewise unclear of the environment in which they are building.  The
issue of balancing the cost of lines and switches remains a critical
issue in designing services in data environments as complex as that of
the Internet.  This is further complicated by more complex parameters in
regards to differences in line capacity, service reliability, network
openness, and so on.  Not everyone wants the same thing with this
information infrastructure, and these differences can be capitalized on
as connection companies try to package special rates to bundle together
these different needs.  The overall sense of this rather dense assertion
can be clarified by looking first at the broadest and most talked about
of information networks these days, the Internet.

	Defining the Internet simply as 'that big network of information
services with a government history' is about as revealing as suggesting
that the telephone network is simply 'that network that interconnects
our voices.'  We need to be much more clear about what we are talking
about.  Minimally defined, the Internet is a data system linked together
by TCP/IP, by the Internet connectivity protocol which makes such
services as remote access (Telnet, finger), file transfer (FTP, email),
and the various menu access and retrieval systems (Gopher, Wide World
Web, etc.) possible.  I need not delay here to provide some sense of the
history of the Internet since there are so many documents both on-line
and off that provide different perspectives on the development of the
Internet and its protocols (Sterling 1993; Quarterman 1992; Krol 1993,
etc.).  Suffice it to say that originally it was a data network designed
to link up the Military, its Industrial Contractors, selected research
universities, as well as a number of research computational devices
(such as 'super-computers'), making use of connectivity protocols that
could withstand nuclear or terrorist attack to any particular line or
switch.  Suffice it also to say that many of the services on the
Internet, such as UseNet, have their own complex, independent histories
which only gradually became fused to those of the Internet.

	This well known overview desperately needs to be supplemented by
a more detailed understanding of the actual organization of the
Internet.  In recent years, the Internet has resembled the
pre-divestiture AT&T with the federally funded NSFnet providing the
central Internet 'backbone' high up at the top of the switching
hierarchy, leading down through more and more branches to distant
terminals (computers), much as the old Class 1 switch would lead down to
more and more regional inter-connections, finally to the Class 5 switch
not far from the user's home or business.  This NSFnet backbone provided
the highest capacity connectivity and helped to coordinate and transmit
the overall flow of information and data, and was run under NSF contract
by ANS (Advanced Network & Services, Inc.), a consortium made up of the
Merit Corp. of Ann Arbor, Michigan, IBM, and MCI.  The Mid-level
networks in the United States, such as Colorado SuperNet, New England's
NEARnet, the Mid-Atlantic's and South's SURAnet, the Midwest's Midnet,
MOREnet, and ArkNet, Texas' Sesquinet and THEnet, to Westnet,
NorthWestNet, and so on have provided more regional interconnections.
Finally, more local providers yet such as Universities and research
institutions (.edu), military bases (.mil), commercial sites (.com),
government agencies (.gov), and specialized organizations (.org) and
networking corporations (.net) provided still more local connectivity.
This final node on this chain of command would be the local 'machine' on
the Internet, labeled by its Internet IP address.  Caught out beyond the
Internet proper one could catch glimpses of other, more distant networks
and connections, some consisting of simple connections from homes via
modems and computers, some connections via local area networks (LANs),
sometimes with infrequent connections to giant private networks run by
the larger computer and telecommunication giants, often running with
incompatible sets of protocols.  Just like the plain old telephone, the
ends of the information network were being linked to something else.
Consider for a moment just how fluid these 'endpoints' to the Internet
had become: (1) from the perspective of under-funded grassroots
networks, (2) well funded business networks, and (3) from the demands of
computer switches themselves.

	1.  Gateways beyond the horizon: A Specialized Public Wanting to
	Communicate

	While this might appear to resemble the AT&T system of days
past, with its various service zones, its long distance carriers, its
local carriers, and so on, several issues must be understood.  First,
the Internet is only one data network (highway) among many.  Many other
networks exist, such as the international store-and-forward Fidonet
computer network.  In fact, FidoNet still reaches more people in more
nations all at a cheaper cost than the Internet (Dodd 1992; Bush 1993).
While popular magazines suddenly discovered the Internet sometime during
1993 and hung their expectations about the 'information infrastructure'
and in terms of the 'information super/highway' on its frame, the
Internet existed as one part of an emerging, interdependent network.
Indeed, since the costs of joining this elite network were high, the
restrictions many, and the technical problems many, unheralded by the
magazines in their search for a new mass media, a diverse set of amateur
networkers were developing a resilient sets of networks.  Consider
Fidonet's email system.  If I wanted to send a note to Tashkent in
Uzbekistan, Central Asia, I could certainly do so to the at least six
BBSs listed there and at minimal cost via FidoNet (say to "Hacker's
Trash BBS" run by Dimon Kalintsev). At an appointed mail hour, all the
Fidonet systems in one of the three Fidonet global time zones close down
to the public and begin to communicate computer to computer, sharing
mail, files, and group conference records.  The computer collectively
share mailing tasks amongst each other.  Fidonet is similar to the
Internet in the way it allows different nodes to share in overall
connectivity, but different in that Fidonet systems are connected to the
larger network only during the appointed mail time, not continuously as
are most Internet systems.

	Fidonet is only one of several 'store and forward' systems
linking up the some 53,000 public bulletin board systems in the US, not
to mention many elsewhere in the world (Rickart 1993:13).  While the
global Internet is only slowly emerging from the provinces of the
Universities, large corporations, and the local national governments,
(less so outside the United States) grassroots connectivity continues to
burgeon.  At a point when the Internet had barely penetrated Argentina,
the regional Fidonet Hub, TangoNet was already active, exchanging mail,
programs, group debates, and so forth with the rest of the world  (cf.
Quarterman 1991).  To some, grassroots systems like Fidonet can be
considered the harbingers of broader band, continuous connectivity to
follow, managing to penetrate where more capital intensive, Internet
like connections can reach only with expense and difficulty.

	Other store and forward networks exist to serve regional and or
organization purposes., and in actuality many of these networks are
being linked into strategic hybrids which reflect differing costs and
opportunities between these networks.  In Montana, the Big Sky Telegraph
has promoted local FidoNet regional networks to share regional
information to lower telephone costs.  The shared exchange of local
electronic dialogue and information is kept as inexpensive as possible
this way, with the Big Sky Telegraph machine itself connecting these
local groups to the larger (electronic) world via the Internet.  For
those seeking broader connectivity, Fidonet operators, following the
lead of amateur radio operators have established satellite links to
carry conference feeds.  Planet Connect of Newport, Tennessee currently
provides a 19.2K baud feed of some 15 to 20 megabytes of Fidonet
conference and UseNet feeds for about $30 a month, capable of being
received by C or Ku band dishes (the initial dish costs about $500).
Messages would then be sent upstream by more conventional forwarding
techniques.

	2. Gateways beyond the horizon: Corporations Wanting to Communicate

	Corporations and governments with a host of special needs, such
as capacity, security, reliability, price, or connectivity were forging
their own links.  Companies such as DEC, IBM, Texas Instruments, and
branches of the Federal Government have long maintained their own
'internal' networks, offering a variety of services from the more
limited use of email, to the much more complicated engineering tasks,
including establishing remote access for hundreds, even thousands of
computers.  TCP/IP is not the only inter-networking protocol, only one
of the more successful.  Local area networks (LANs) have established a
number of access topologies (ring, star, etc.) by which computers linked
together using a high capacity cable so the connected computers can
contact or poll each other, sharing information and resources.  The
software that supports this connectivity, such as Novell's Netware,
assumes that the cost of linking these machines together is low since
the lines tend to be relatively local, within or between rooms or local
buildings.

	However, increasingly LANs are being welded together into WANs,
wide area networks that in turn link together connection dense LANs with
generally expensive long distance connections.  These WANs can be global
in their operations, linking up thousands of computers and LANs
worldwide. Texas Instrument's WAN links together over 100,000 devices
throughout the world making use of rented satellite transponders, and a
variety of cables and leased connections (Smith & Udell 1993).  Because
of the continued connectivity expense, WAN technology continues to
innovate in issues of bypass using fixed or leased lines, semi-dynamic
packet switched lines (X.25 and now 'frame relay'), and where available,
dynamic circuit switched connections (via ISDN).  This almost external
force pushes and pulls at the edges of systems like the Internet,
sometimes interfacing with it, sometimes carrying some of its traffic,
sometimes avoiding it and its costs all together.  WANs take us back to
when transport was more expensive than switching, to a time of a more
pronounced static hierarchy.  The culture of WAN administrators is one
of the few remaining outposts of the older mainframe culture with is
data priests ('DP's').  While the LANs are associated with "small groups
of like minded people, where the cardinal values are quick development,
high functionality, and access to resources, the culture of WAN
management "has evolved to serve the needs of a large and extremely
diverse set of users.  Security, data integrity, and highly scalable
performance are what count here" (Tibbetts & Bernstein 1993).  WAN
culture in contrast with LAN culture develops through the needs to plan
connections ahead of time, must take issues of security, archiving, and
reliability very seriously, whereas LAN culture is known for simply
setting up a connection between a group of computers as a kind of
spontaneous, ad hoc exercise.

	WANs tend to have a more hierarchical ordering as they organize
limited connection resources.  As LANs and WANs gradually merge, and
short haul and long haul protocols are integrated, taking advantage of
the innovative switching topologies, we should see a flattening of these
connective hierarchies as well.  For now these private networks work to
extend the Internet from the outside, playing geodesically with
connections within the Internet as well.  Speciality networks like WANs
continue to expand and strengthen the structural integrity (or
tensegrity) of the whole.  Consider the extent to which transnational
Corporations (TNCs) are the product of advanced communication.  Many
TNCs, such as the Schlumberger are using TCP/IP protocols on their own
networks, creating in essence their own private Internets, complete with
gopher and web sites unavailable, even invisible, to the general
Internet public (cf. Uncapher 1994b).  These corporations provide yet
another almost unmarked region at the edge of the known Internet where
demands for alternative service are high and the resources for making
these connections available.

	3. Gateways beyond the horizon: Computers wanting to communicate

	As the number of data networks continued to expand, so their
links have continued to become more seamless and automatic.  Fidonet is
gated to the Internet and thus anyone on the Fidonet can send a message
to someone of the Internet, and vice-versa.  Published books such as
John Quarterman's The Matrix have done their best to keep up with how to
address mail to different networks, trying to keep up with their very
existence of these alternative networks (1990; also Frey 1991).  On-line
documents rather than published books are increasingly shouldering the
burden of identifying and negotiating these dynamic links since they are
changing so fast (cf. Yanoff 1993).  Alternative networks and services
might include not just Fidonet, but Applelink, AT&T mail and their
Easylink, DEC's Easynet, the academic Bitnet, Alternex (Brazil), Glasnet
(Russia), the Web (Canada), etc. While some of these links depend on
email like store and forward processing, others make use of ISDN like
interconnections, capable of handling more information.  For example,
Telecom Canada's Envoy-100 commercial network uses the international
X.400 address system to facilitate fast, relatively broadband
connections with neighboring networks.  As with Peter Huber's phantom
endpoints, each 'final' node might in fact be a gate to another network,
another set of connections.

		Establishing Appropriate Capacity

	In exploring the similarities between these communication
networks and the pre-divestiture AT&T, we need to realize that unlike
the earlier telephone system that for the most part simply exchanged
voice connections which made few demands on the carrying capacity of the
old twisted pair, the copper wire going to the home.  Now the networks
can vary as to their bandwidth, from the still lowly twisted pair, to T1
(1.5 Mbps) to T3 (45 Mbps), and even higher in primarily experimental or
dedicated connections.  At this point the NSFnet backbone runs at T3, a
rate which could move data at a speed of 1,400 pages of text per second.
At that rate a 20 volume could be sent across the net in 30 seconds.
(Hart 1992).  When David Blair's movie "Wax: or the Discovery of
Television by the Bees" was transmitted recently over the Internet, only
connections close to the faster portions of the Internet could really
pick it up.  While the increasing investment in fiber optic broadband
will make faster connections increasingly available, we need to consider
what is happening in this transition period to broadband, and what this
transition period indicates about future.  Pricing with so many factors
such as reliability, capacity, service arrangements, etc. can be
something of a speculative art.  Indeed, many of the earlier competitors
to AT&T, such as Sprint sought package rates in new ways based on new
service combinations.  Sprint would lease voice lines from AT&T and then
send data over them.  Since data took up less bandwidth than most voice,
and could be packeted and switched in smaller packages, Sprint would
profit from the difference in these rates.

	Until fiber optic and other broad band networks become more
universal, cost and capacity will be intimately related.  Whereas a 128
or 64 kbs WANs might need special arrangements to get the best tariff
rates, such as renting a 'dedicated line,' establishing an ISDN virtual
network, or renting a satellite transponder, many rural areas might find
that there is real payoff in simply expanding the uses of traditional
telephone and cable lines to the fullest, something that will be
discussed later in this paper. With this being  the case then there will
need to be education to aid administrators in determining just how
optimize the information infrastructure until the fiber optic/broad
band/ gets there.  And even then, cost will be an issue.  However, we
now need to consider how transformation at the mid levels of the
Internet and related networks are also transforming just how high the
costs might be.  With the reality of 'traffic jams' on the Internet
becoming clear, clearly some pricing for premium service will be
implemented if only as a kind of traffic control (cf. Kleinrock 1992).
But what will such a pricing mechanism look like, especially as
mechanism develop to automatically bypass the more expensive tracts in
the datasphere?  We now need to consider bypass and the restructuring of
the actual Internet.

		Transformations at the Mid-Levels: The Shattering Begins

	With stage set like this, with a top heavy switching hierarchy
amid the growing technologies of bypass, was it any wonder that
information users were constructing new kinds of connections?  The
digital MCI's were at the door, and door was open.  Within the Internet
itself, a number of forces have been pushing to undermine its
traditional hierarchies, flattening the hierarchy into a geodesic
structure. With the increase in activity and demand for Internet access,
there has been considerable growth in private, for-profit Internet
backbones.  The popular notion that the Internet is primarily devoted to
educational, research oriented, non profit traffic has long been
patently false.  As early at 1991, over half the Internet traffic was
commercial, and by late 1993, over 80% of the traffic was commercial.
Only traffic on the basic NSF backbone was limited to non-commercial
traffic, and this restriction was causing a lot of bypass.  In fact with
costs and usage rising, the Internet has long been moving towards some
kind of privatization.

	Already, the main source of federal funds to the Internet, the
NSF (National Science Foundation) has announced that it would shedding
much of it funding for the more 'public' backbones that had been
organized and run by ANS (the Advanced Networks Services) by April,
1994.  Instead NSF will concentrate on developing an even faster
research network, as well as developing the backbone for the "National
Research and Educational Network" (NREN).  When in 1991 the ANS prepared
to charge its mid-level networks connection fees, a number of the
independent and mid-level providers, such as Alternet, PSInet, CerfNet,
and Sprintnet retaliated by organizing CIX (Commercial Internet
Exchange) to promote commercial 'IP' connectivity.  Other privately
funded backbones have been appearing in Canada, Europe, and in the rest
of the world (Deutsch 1993:82, Community Information Exchange 1993).

	In many respects the establishment of CIX was none to late in
coming.  As early as 1990, ANS had been pushing towards privatizing the
network itself, and being a kind of monopoly carrier to both subsidized
public research connections, and the unsubsidized commercial
connections, promising to figure out a way to keep the two digital data
streams apart when it came to giving priority to the subsidized traffic.
As Gordon Cook has written:

With planning for an NREN going forward in Congress and competition
there between the Department of Energy and the National Science
Foundation for lead agency, the NSF had ambitious plans for continued
growth of the NSFnet backbone.  Unfortunately for it [it] had little
money with which to fund an upgrade to T-3 speed.  At some point in
early 1990 with IBM in the lead, MERIT came up with a plan to create ANS
as a non profit operator for a new high speed privatized commercialized
backbone.  The NSF was asked to accept the privatization of the backbone
by means of a realignment of the cooperative agreement with MERIT.
Short of terminating the cooperative agreement and the politically
unthinkable course of immediately putting the backbone up for rebid, it
had no other recourse but to accept the terms offered.  (Cook 1993)

The situation has similarities to the divestiture of AT&T.  The many
mid-level networks mentioned above were spun off from the federally
subsidized NSFnet and re-attached to the privatized backbone.  ANS set
up CO+RE (Commercial plus Research and Education) subsidiary to handle
the commercial traffic.  Like AT&T, the old ANS seemed interested in
profiting from the new trend in telecommunication.  This is not
surprising considering that the ANS consortium, made up of IBM, MCI and
Merit were all now in an ideal place to capitalize on their knowledge of
how the data networks run.  Again, what complicated matters, however, is
that part of their business was still being subsidized by the government
(i.e. the taxpayer), while other revenues were being generated by access
revenues, much as AT&T had tried to separate its basic, regulated
services from its 'enhanced,' often unregulated services.  ANS
declaration that they would be able to tell which data stream through
their switches was which, whether from their private or their subsidized
connections, and to give priority to the subsidized research
connections, in fact was not true:

In allowing ANS to sell direct access to its own network (ANSnet) that
used the same physical facilities as NSFnet, the NSF spoke of two
virtual and presumably distinct networks. It properly insisted that
commercial traffic placed by ANS on its network not diminish bandwidth
needed by its own customers.  However ANS's January 15 1991 Proposal to
the NSF made clear that once dumped into the network packets from its
commercial customers would be indistinguishable from those of the NSF's
customers  (Cook 1993).

It is little wonder that the NSF proposed withdrawing direct support of
the networks, concentrating simply on subsidizing the creation of newer
advanced high speed networks, and to more direct grants to various
carriers and services.  The future direction of this funding, and even
the notion of NREN, one of the main funding pipelines established by the
High-Performance Computer Act S.272  in December 9, 1991, still remains
unclear.  The fact that funding for the government backbone is going to
end in April 1994 should not be so surprising given that the funders can
no longer be sure what it is they are funding.  Indeed, according to
Peter Deutsch, "Traffic on the United States Government funded National
Science Foundation (NSF) backbone (once the core of the entire worldwide
Internet because of its key role as a transit point for traffic between
third world countries) is now dwarfed by traffic on private portions of
the Internet, including such groups as that operated by the CIX.
(Deutsch 1993).

	While it seemed to the general public that the government was
simply abandoning the NSFnet backbone just as the US was beginning to
develop its 'Information Highway,' in fact the highway was beginning to
fractally decompose into a myriad of connections and strategies, and the
old hands at ANS were among the first to want to take advantage of the
new situation.  The often heard debate as to whether the Internet should
be a public resource stressing public goods, or a private enterprise
stressing efficiency misses the point: the answer is a combination of
both.  The question as to whether we (whoever that is) should turn the
Internet created out of public tax dollars to private interests, part of
that eternal capitalist logic of 'privatizing the profits and
socializing the losses' can not be simply applied to a network as hybrid
and complex as the Internet.  We need, in fact, to look at the
organizational level.

	In Austin, Tx, for example, direct Internet access continues to
broaden.  While one can go the route of hiring access to the Internet
via the University of Texas, such as is done by the several local
software firms, such as Quadralay, access can now also be hired from
various packagers (such as Meritnet, Inc.) using lines of SprintNet,
Compuserve, HoloNet, and UUnet/Alternet.  As will be discussed later,
the Austin based Research Consortium MCC (Microelectronics and Computer
Technology Corp.) is developing  its own access and information sharing
network for regional companies: EINet.  The Texas Department of Commerce
likewise is seeking to extend EINet to Open Network Enterprise
(Texas-One).  James Ullrich, of the Austin Independent School District
said that local school district  (AISD) were linking up all the High
Schools in the Austin area with fiber optic strands beginning the Fall
of 1994 and finishing by Summer of 1995.  The School district decided
that it would be cheaper to drop of the Southwestern Bell Local
Exchange, and set up their own telephone system.  Since fiber is cheaper
is generally cheaper than cable, they decided to develop a system they
could grow into.  They then brought other governmental and public
institutions onto their new network, which will become an Internet node
by the Fall.  I was told they didn't even really know what to do with
all the switching and access they were about to get.  Other Austin
companies spoke of CAPs, competitive access providers, as ways to bypass
the local Southwestern Bell.  The Austin Independent School District
plans to provide direct Internet gateways, bypassing the cost and
congestion of University of Texas links.  All of these new access routes
point to a flattening of the switching hierarchies and a more geodesic
informational infrastructure.

	Transformations at the Higher Levels The Shattering Continues

	By January 1994, however, ANS who had wanted to be the first to
capitalize on the new connectivity, finally capitulated instead and
announced that it too intended to join CIX, supporting the project of
open networks.  No sooner did this happen then within days, ANS
customers began  announcing that they would no longer give ANS their
exclusive contracts.  The California research network BARRNet, announced
that as of January 1, 1994, it is withdrawing from ANS CO+RE service in
favor of a T1 CIX connection because:

	1. We have not been happy with the results of the ANS/CIX
arrangement that was supposed to guarantee symmetry for traffic between
pure-research sites. Since there appears to be no way for ANS to fix
this without cooperation from other network providers and since we can
implement the same routing policy in place now with a direct CIX
connection at much lower cost, we have decided to install the direct
connection.  2. With the recent decision by ANS to join the CIX, it is
now possible to route traffic to other ANS CO+RE customer via the CIX
rather than having to make special CO+RE arrangements on behalf of
BARRNet subscribers.  3. There have been a number of cases where using
ANS as a transit path to the CIX has made it difficult to resolve
certain routing problems. A direct connection from BARRNet to the CIX
should improve our ability to troubleshoot connectivity in such cases.
(BARRNet Announcement, January 1994)

Bit by bit, the old hierarchies of service organizations are flattening
out, and connectivity at all levels is expanding.  But does that mean
simply that the unbundling ends at the node?  The answer to this,
explored in the next section, is no.  The Logic of Unbundling

	The importance of bypass and inter-network competition to the
communities and businesses cannot be understated.  Should there be one
subsidized 'pipeline' to the community service, however defined, or a
competing selection among such carriers?  Should we mandate
interconnectivity as being in the public interest?  Users, even in the
educational community are looking for cheaper bypass and technology is
making this available for the on the Internet, and by analogy, in the
Information Datasphere.  Unbundling and modular substitutability will
extend down into the local information loop, indeed into the computer
itself, as well, and out into the broadest range of the Datasphere.
Spread Band Packet Radio, for example, promises to by a kind of fiber
optic bypass.  Spread Band Packet is a digital radio that uses of a
spread of available frequencies the way that packet switched networks
make use of a choice of available telephone lines.  By doing so the
available and limited radio spectrum is used much more efficiently.
That combined with other digital technologies such as data compression
and the tighter tolerances available with transmission error correction
suggests that computer enhanced radio might eventually provide a kind of
'fiber optic bypass.' We might therefore hope to see more and more
competition for local information service, and with it, and undermining
of the concept of local telephone (voice/limited data) service.

	Likewise, deep within the heart of the computer we are finally
witnessing the unbundling and modularization of the very heart of the
computer itself.  The hold of a few design giants like Intel is giving
way to the more open architecture of RISC chips, as well as to Cyrix's
open design.  When Intel itself recently allowed independent software
companies to compile the Intel Pentium (586) chip, it made a long term
strategic mistake if it had wanted to hold onto their near monopoly
position on the PC market.  Compiling for Intel today, a concern can go
on to compile for Motorola tomorrow.  But did the megaliths like Intel
and Microsoft have a choice as the revolutions that they unleashed begin
to tear them apart as well.  Those who ignore the interconnectivity of
the revolution will be bypassed.

	Along with the unbundling of the lines, there is also an
unbundling of the services connected to those lines.  Indeed, we should
be seeing an increasing unbundling local telephone access, all the way
to the unbundling of most telephone services, with the potential for
independent contractors buying dialtone time (so that, perhaps, by
buying a service one would hear the weather or a radio station rather
than a static dialtone).  Together we are witnessing the unbundling of
the entire 'telephone system,' as well as the demise of the theory of
the local natural monopoly.  As of 1993, there were already 46
separately managed CAP (competitive access providers) in 80 U.S. cities
and in the top 25 metropolitan offering larger business the ability to
bypass the local telephone companies by means of a dedicated fiber or
coaxial connections to the point of presence (POP) of the long distance
carrier (Huber 1994)

	The geodesic structure is fed not only by an unbundling of
connections, but also of the 'services'  within these connections.  The
services become a kind of content, being perhaps recognizable as a
traditional media product, but also potentially something that is part
of the part of the process of connection.  The distinctions between
'content' and 'carrier' become harder and harder the fathom.  George
Gilder has written about the issue of 'dark cable' where there is an
unbundling of the provision of the fiber optic line (which he seems to
suggest would be provided by a common carrier), and the source of
'light' at its ends.  He mentions that much of the impetus for this
unbundling has come from large corporations who want direct access to
the optical cables that many of the telephone companies have.  After an
initial experimental provision of this capability, the regional Bell
companies have been denying access.  The result: companies like EDS have
been laying in their own fiber optic cables to bypass the bottlenecks,
setting up their own networks where feasible.  (Gilder, to appear).

	Surprisingly, many of the extant telephone companies appear in a
rush to own large portions of the 'information highway' at what might
well be excessive prices.  Much of the concern about the merger of the
cable giant TCI, and the telephone giant, Bell Atlantic appeared to have
followed upon the logic that one company will be able to buy up the
market, or at least a good chunk of it.  Many of the old critical
theorist, extend the "pushbutton fantasy" articulated by critical
theorist Vincent Mosco which suggested that a few powerful companies
could buy their way into key locations, much as telegraph companies
might have done in the past, such as colonialist powers had done, and
then dominate all their competitors: using the electronic revolution to
extend domination and control under the guise of interpersonal liberty.
Using the telegraph model, the electronic networks were networks of
control and surveillance.  He might take note that Rupert Murdoch,
currently proprietor of the pan-Asia video service Star TV, as well as
holder of media properties worldwide, had recently acquired the Delphi
Internet services, a national on-line service with some increasing
Internet connectivity.

	However, the issue that the movement of the intelligence of the
networks to the periphery of the network, of the decreasing sunk costs
to join, argues against such hard and fast interpretations of
centralization.  Electronic media products seem to be following a
different tact than that which supported global economic imperialism of
material goods.  Since the MacBride commission in 1979, not only have
more countries around the world begun to produce their own news and
entertainment, and not only have more alternative, grassroots exchange
networks (of audio and video tapes, fax, computer networks, Xerox
technology, desktop publishing, etc.) developed to undermine censorship
(but not repression), but there have been more and more communication
schools and other production oriented facilities developing to take
advantage of these new networks and to address issues of more local
production values.  The videotext giants have begun to crumble, or at
least are losing their hegemonic grip on the minds, hearts, and
keyboards of their subscribers.  If Prodigy had a billion to spend to
create its videotext empire, it had a billion to lose as well.
Prodigy's deep pockets may well have been not deep enough when it
underestimated the nature and extent of their digital competition.  The
Internet is undermining Prodigy's go-it-alone strategy, and with it, the
kinds of profits that a go-it-alone provider might reap.  Indeed if the
kinds of pushbutton fantasies entertained by members of the left whereby
a central group could disseminate revolutionary calls to empowerment had
been half way true, then indeed relatively capital rich corporations
like IBM and Sear's Prodigy might be looming above our monitors even as
I write.

	From this perspective then, had the TCI-Bell Atlantic merger
succeeded, the resulting corporation would have been swept into a world
of bypass.  If they had billions to spend, they also had billions to
lose.  The AT&T divestiture reflects the instability of any 'connection
company' trying to own all of the links in a world of interconnectivity
and bypass.  Take too much profit and then others will try to find
routes around the high priced carrier.  The logic of the market appears
to be pressing towards greater bypass and decentralization, such that
even a few billion dollars won't reverse.

		Bundling all the World back Together: Interface

	If the Datasphere is becoming a sea of potential connections,
then we will need tools with which to navigate those connections.  The
tools that facilitate navigation might be generally known as interface,
serving to bring together a disparate collection of intentions and
presentations.  As we change the way we navigate the datasphere, or move
into cyberspace, then the skills will also change.  There is a politics
to the interface in the sense it is at the level of the interface that
networks and nodes can become hard or easy to use.  Bad interfaces
frustrate people and lose information.  Some of the poorly designed
Internet interfaces found on old mainframe computers and retooled for
modern Internet use (such as the VMS) stem from the era when mainframe
computers was the domain of data priests who hoarded their knowledge
about how the system worked, and held onto their power as the necessary
intermediaries between the machine and the desired outcome.  This is
gradually changing, and we can anticipate better interfaces using a
variety of input devices and flexible, forgiving data tools, such as
'intelligent interfaces' that make use of an artificial intelligence,
fuzzy logic, or expert neural network system to anticipate our needs and
proclivities.  The issue of interface involves much more than this,
however.

	There is a kind of competition going on in providing better,
more integrated menus.  As information, services, and transmission
becomes more unbundled in the name of efficiency and bypass, so the
process of bundling, or 'menuing' becomes a site of competition.
Integration can mean that the same activities (going up or down a menu)
will be done with the same key strokes, mouse clicks, kinetic gestures,
or vocal commands in a variety of otherwise different contexts.  If I
want to go up a menu, I should be able to type 'u' whether I am in
gopher, in a mailer program, a news reader, or whatever.  The goal is
provide a flexible, integrated, seamless menu that acts just like any
other drive or application on one's home computer. Put another way, the
home is becoming more integrated while the highway is becoming more
geodesic. Individuals and those connected to the networks can become
more integrated as well, using the intelligence of the interface to
negotiate which bit of information, which difference is the difference
that will make a difference.  For example, Engage Communication, Inc.
provides a 'one-step connection and file transfer solution' which send
files around a global WAN by having a user simply drop the icon of a
file onto a destination icon found in the transfer directory.  The
computer automatically makes the connection and negotiates the
connection.  Users of SLIP connections which can provide point and click
interfaces on the Internet know this well.  If there is a cost
associated with accessing 'one of your computers directories' then that
might be noted, and a cost effective means of getting that information
might be negotiated.

	Finally, we need to consider that the intelligence of the
interface can become part of the intelligence of the overall network
since in both cases what the switch or computer does in 'bundle
connections together' when they are needed.  In the case of the
Internet, each machine or node is responsible for itself, and for the
little bit of 'line' near to it (cf. Chee-Kai 1992).  By keeping that
machine relatively open to public switching, to data stream redirection,
then the endpoint becomes part of the network switching devices, capable
of carrying and directing a certain amount of traffic.  The Gopher menu
system on many Internet machines depends on this distributed switching
capability.  Each gopher host machine can serve both as a menu system
with resources, and as a switch to the next server.  The switch is a
computer and the computer is a switch.  One of the reasons that the cost
of the Internet connectivity has been so low is not that there is
someone behind it all who has an immensely large pocketbook, big daddy
NSF (although the public does not always appreciate the billions that
have gone into creating and running the Internet), but because so many
machines are sharing the switching load.  Since the overall
functionality of the net comes from sharing of resources, it is not hard
to see why the abuse of the net by a few renegades who would try to
commit traditional 'mass mailing' is so harmful, since everyone has to
share in paying to have the message sent, not the people sending it.

	Conclusion: Communities & The New Geometry of Communication

	In developing communities, individual empowerment, business
viability, and adequate government policy, we must bear in mind this
increasingly geodesic nature of the information infrastructure, and the
interdependence of the issues of the bypass, information provision, and
the geometry of information access.  A key issue of developing community
networks, for example, has not been how to set up a few nodes here or
there, or to provide discount courses in computer literacy, but in
promoting the access to truly useful information, and in facilitating
interconnection.  The information that needs to be retrieved does not
exist in any one place; it is located in bits and pieces everywhere.
The flattening of hierarchies means that individuals are demanding more
direct access to information, and ways to turn that information into
knowledge and wisdom.  To transmute data into information, users need to
be able to continually contextualize and recontextualize.  Whereas our
books in the past have tried to anticipate that context, to anticipate
the kinds of questions that might be asked, the more dynamic information
retrieval and exchange systems allows the users to pursue further what
he or she does not know.  To truly understand this in the context of
changing means of communication, we need to look not just to the people
involved in the communication, or to the institutions of access, but to
a new relationship between them.

	The model of the electronic 'town hall' makes sense in a world
once organized by mass media, where one central location can serve as a
meeting place for the diverse elements of the community.  That is not to
say that mass media need to have organized the meeting, but rather that
there would be one physical place which would reach out to the many.  At
that central place different constituencies could be bound into a
community, as might a roomful of Vermonters, warmed by a stove, talking
collective politics, shame the obstreperous into silence with a scornful
glance, but giving way as well to the uncommon and unconventional.  Now
the rooms in virtual kind of town hall might lead anywhere, and be
anywhere: local and not local begin lose their coherence as online
descriptors, at least as linked to geophysical communities.  Instead of
having one meeting place, why not have all the different conversations
echoed onto different local systems, each of them serving their own
constituencies?  But what will the level of discourse be?  What will the
content be?  Who will be left out?  One of my rationales in writing this
article has been that only with a sense of the developing geodesic
infrastructure can these questions of sustaining geophysical and virtual
communities be approached.  We need to imagine what a geodesic
information policy might look like.

	It is perhaps too easy to think of this new world and media of
cyberspace in terms of the older, more industrially suited topologies of
hierarchies and centers.  These hierarchies and centers continue to
exist in the world of material movement, in the world of the deployment
of limited resources including capital.  And yet the ongoing media
revolution of the 'technologies of organization' is remarkably
under-theorized, and some of this might be traced to an oversight of
issues of geodesics.  Since identities relate us to our environment, to
our communities, so technologies that change the access and nature of
these communities will profoundly affect these basic identities.  What
becomes of the geophysical community when its citizens disappear into
other communities of interest and production that do not necessarily
need the references to physical transport, as they depend on the
geodesic infrastructure.  We neglect to consider how these technologies
are changing the identity of corporations and individuals who are become
accustomed to using it.  Something is happening, indeed, to the
Trains-national Corporations as they seek to decentralize themselves to
become more fluid so as to keep up with the rapidly changing
environment, the very environment that gave birth to them.  While they
continue of organize at a global level, what is to become of their
increasingly independent components, and the way these component firms
spin off yet other parts?  To what extent are these part or integrated
into a single 'corporation.'  These answers and implications to these
questions are of course complex and important.  The present paper has
sought not to solve them but to emphatically suggest that if we are to
properly pose these questions in the first place, we need to look deeply
into the changing, geodesic topology of the information networks.  And
this is something that planners of community networks need to do as
well.

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