========================================================================== OPN UPDATE: November 28th, 1994 ========================================================================== What's going on? Why are we here? Where are we going? What hat do I wear? It's time once again to... Take a look at the big picture! Consider the following: Digital communications are already being used for e-mail and are beginning to displace much paper mail communications. The internet will be the global postal service of the 21st century. The next order of magnitude jump in internet bandwidth will see widespread use of software telephones that digitize your voice (and probably your image too), and carry it anywhere in the world to be played back (displayed) on the-party-to-whom-you-are-speaking's multimedia computer. This will happen in near real-time. You will be able to hold conferences with any number of participants anywhere in the world, even to broadcast to a large group of people for a seminar, class, workshop or business presentation. The next wave of internet technology will begin to replace the global telephone network. The internet will be the global newspaper distribution system of the 21st century. Magazines too. As mail-order companies go on-line, the internet will become the global shopping mall of the 21st century. Knowbots will help you find the best deals as well as independent reports on quality of products and customer support of various merchants. Libraries will distribute books on-line. People will telecommute to work and at the college level even to school for many of the large lecture-hall type courses. Digitally distributed Videos will replace TV. You will have access to news broadcasts from decades ago to the present. The memory-less media of TV and radio will become video and audio journals with an accessible past. Records, tapes, books, concerts, lectures, meetings may all be on-line. As data-packets replace paper, the forests of the world will breathe a huge sigh of relief. As more people work, study, and shop at home there will be fewer two-car families and more zero-car families. The atmosphere will breathe a huge sigh of relief. As more businesses use teleconferencing instead of jet travel, there will be fewer jet planes criss-crossing the planet. All to the good. Telecommuting jobs will mean that many people will no longer have to choose between career and family when deciding where to live. One result may be grandchildren and grandparents will tend not to be strangers. Even as our minds span the planet and encompass a global perspective, we may become even more firmly rooted in our homes; our sense of belonging in a place will grow. We may cease being economic refugees "camping out" near one job after another. We may begin to care more about local politics after a sense of home-place takes root in our hearts. If you are a first american, you may not have to choose between education/career and living on tribal lands-- you may be able to have both. If you are not a first american, you may, in time, begin to experience the strong ties to place and tribe/family that come from several generations living in the same home-place. And when educational and career opportunities do take family and friends to different parts of the world it will be far easier to stay in touch. All of this is possible only IF the internet is accessible to all at very low prices. That's a BIG IF. Not to be on the internet in the 21st century will be to be part of an underclass. With increasing economic stratification and the spectre of a jobless economic recovery rearing its ugly head recently, I for one am seriously worried that the information-less underclass could be very large if the distribution of information is left to market forces alone. Private industry is not blind to the potential utility of the internet and a power struggle is going on right now to determine the future ownership of the internet. Republican philosophy which tends to embrace privatizing everything coupled with the recent shift of balance in Congress does not bode well for public interests being preserved in the internet. Powerful lobbies are at work on Capitol Hill. We, as a world civilization, are at a cross-roads. On one path, if private interests gain ownership of the internet they'll charge whatever price the market will bear for data communications. This would cut a lot of people out and make many of the advances in civilization and ecologically sustainable practices outlined above too expensive to be of practical value. Some private on-line services already charge $.50 per e-mail message. Some charge $10/hour of connect time. Some Republican politicians have recently suggested turning over the US Postal Service to Federal Express. Would we then be paying closer to $10 per letter instead of 29 cents? Who knows? The assumption that private industry is more efficient than public institutions needs to be seriously examined instead of taken as an axiom. How can having to produce a return-on-investment for stockholders over-and-above operating costs make any institution inherently more efficient? When an industry is a monopoly, or a regional monopoly (like the current telephone system), no competition is possible. Wouldn't an internet run by private interests most closely resemble a regional monopoly? How does a profit-motivated organization set prices in such a situation and where is the motivation for low prices? On the other path is the Free-Net and Community Network path which seeks to make digital communications available to everyone at minimal to zero cost. We at OPN have chosen this path because we believe it is in the public interest to have an information superhighway without toll booths so that the dream of a more globally-aware, lower-ecological-impact, more technologically advanced civilization is possible. After all, much of the Internet was built with tax dollars and it belongs, ultimately, to U.S. citizens. If we like it, we should keep it. Even if you disagree with the universal low-cost access approach, you may want to support OPN just as an experiment to see how it fares compared to the private services. You can help decide which path becomes the reality. Your involvement in OPN may only mean that you know a good deal when you see it, but we hope it also means that you believe in and support our goals of universal, inexpensive access and want to help us make that goal a reality. Priority access income helps us to meet our operational costs, but it is not enough for OPN to grow on. We need to buy more computing and networking equipment so we can grow to provide access not just to the 1800 most technologically aware citizens of Lane County, but to the tens of thousands of people who will want/need access before the turn of the century. Your gift to the OPN New Equipment Fund will not go to salaries or postage or phone bills. It will be spent only for faster computers, more terminal servers, routers, modems, disk space and other equipment needed to operate OPN's service. As OPN is a 501-c3 non-profit tax exempt charitable organization, your gift will be fully tax deductible (if you itemize deductions on a schedule A). We also have pledges from board members to match the first $1700 of your contributions dollar-for- dollar, and we hope to get pledges from major donors to match even more contributions in the final weeks of 1994. Thanks for reading. Please take a moment and mail a check today (payable to "Oregon Public Networking" or "OPN") to: OPN, Attn: New Equipment Fund PO Box 1914 Eugene OR 97440-1914 Remember to write your user-id (login name) and "New Equipment Fund" on the check in the "memo" or "for" space in the lower left. Thanks for your support. +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Oregon Public Networking -- "Connect Globally; Dial Locally" +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+