This is the second of two articles marking the 30th anniversary of the Internet in Australia. This one looks at the idea of ‘The information superhighway’ for which the Internet was but one candidate. The first article is here.
Back in the mid 1990s as the Internet was becoming established in Australia there was much debate about something called ‘The Information superhighway’. The Internet has very much fulfilled the vision for that superhighway, but that was not seen as being inevitable at the time.
According to one definition, the information superhighway is a term used mainly in the 1990s to describe a national communications network that would span the US and allow Americans to quickly access and exchange information via voice, data, video and other services.
It became closely associated with Al Gore who vice president during the Clinton Administration championed the benefits of a high-speed information network. However it featured prominently in discussions about telecommunications in Australia in the mid nineties.
References to the information superhighway appeared frequently in Exchange, many of these concerned the question of whether the Internet of something else would become the Information superhighway.
A talk I gave in November 1994, summed up the situation.
First there was the information superhighway. The wonderful new communications technology that will bring everything from movies on demand to interactive games and home shopping right into your lounge room via your TV set, the kids video game machine, your personal computer. No one seems quite sure which, but be patient we are told: the information superhighway is coming real soon now.
Then the pundits started talking about the Internet, a strangely anarchic and esoteric network of thousands of computers around the world which almost anyone can access. They suggested that, if not an information superhighway, the Internet was at least an information suburban street. It lacks the capacity to deliver video but can give you a vast range of information on to your PC. And more importantly it’s here now and it’s free.
True. Unfortunately the Internet is more like a trail through an uncharted information jungle than a suburban street. You need expertise and skills to even get started let alone explore it. Have you ever seen an Internet address? It reads like something my cat types when it walks across the keyboard.
No demand for broadband, said Aus Government
Earlier that year the Australian Government’s Broadband Services Expert Group (remember them?) had issued a discussion paper saying: “while much has been written on the potential impact of the ‘information superhighway’ to date there exists little hard evidence of the demand for, and costs and benefits of, a broadband network.”
It wanted information on services that might be provided by such a network, including specific requirements such as data rate or interactivity and evidence of likely demand for the service.
In that same edition Exchange reported plans by US telco MCI to invest $US20 billion on an ‘information superhighway’ At this time the ‘Baby Bells’ held a monopoly on access networks with MCI, AT&T and others restricted to long distance services.
MCI’s plan was dismissed by well-known Australian economist Henry Ergas as “mere posturing” to persuade the Baby Bells to lower their access charges.
Narrowband was bandwidth enough
A few months later Exchange reported Daniel Petre, then a director of Microsoft Asia-Pacific telling a conference that the existing narrowband infrastructure had become a “forgotten child” and that many of the services proposed for the information superhighway such as electronic mail, home shopping and interactive games could be accommodated by existing bandwidth.
Meanwhile, hype about the superhighway was ramping up rapidly and the Internet was being pushed as the primary candidate. In July 1994 Exchange reported:
There’s a major battle going on between the academic community which runs the Internet on whether it should grasp the nettle of commercialisation and really push the superhighway role. If it does not, others will step into the breach.
“One of the largest commercial systems is CompuServe. It now has two million users worldwide and the recent interest in superhighways has seen membership grow by 80,000 per month. You can publish electronically, and advertise your wares and services to a global market electronically.
At around this time the still rather nebulous idea of an information superhighway was being seen as, potentially, a force to be reckoned with and demanding of the attention of policymakers
Barry Jones, then national president of the Australian Labor Party issued a call for Australia to develop a national information policy. He criticised the government for not setting a broad set of guidelines in the face of “potential economic hazards, such as the much vaunted information superhighway.”
Never mind the network: it’s content that counts
Then in August 1994 the Broadband Services Expert Group released its interim report in which it identifed content not delivery ntworks, as the key issue in the development of future communications services.
Exchange reported that the group had “eschewed the ‘information superhighway’ concept from the United States in favour of a series of interconnected networks ‘some broad, some perhaps very narrow’. It noted the present fundamental need to determine “the potential demand for broadband services in Australia”.
And in a spectacular case of short sightedness, Exchange reported in September 1994:
Speculation that video-on-demand via the information superhighway will mean the end of the video store does not appear to be of concern to the US’ largest chain of video stores.
The Australian Financial Review reports that Blockbuster Entertainment Corporation, described as the ‘MacDonalds of video’ has announced plans to invest $100 million in Australia over the next five years to set up a chain of 200 Blockbuster Video stores.”
Oops!
The idea of an information superhighway was also conflated with access networks such as the NBN. In October 1994, under the headline “$40b bill for the information superhighway” Exchange reported:
Conservative estimates from the Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics (BTCE) put the cost of installing a hybrid fibre/co-axial broadband network to all households in Australia capable of supporting pay TV, interactive services and full point to point telecommunications at around $40 billion.
By early 1995 the information superhighway was at the top of the government’s agenda.
An ad hoc Cabinet committee chaired by the Prime Minister, Paul Keating, will be at the top of a decision-making pyramid for the national information superhighway strategy. … A Government Information Services Policy Board, overseeing a whole-of-government approach to the superhighway, will be headed by a senior Department of Finance bureaucrat and supported by an Office of Government Information Technology.
It’s hard to say exactly when, but the idea of the information superhighway separate from the Internet died and the Internet became the information superhighway.
