International Journal of Communications Law & Policy

TOWARD THE GLOBAL INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE

By Denis Gilhooly

Download the Paper in PDF Format: IJCLP Web-Doc 9-3-1999

Abstract

For governments, industry and consumers, the communications revolution is extending far beyond the boundaries of the communications sector, with the widespread availability of powerful but affordable communications having a profound effect on the pattern of world-wide commercial, economic and social development. Electronic networks place established business strategies, market structures, regulatory constructs, even notions of national sovereignty under enormous strain. Adapting to the stresses and distresses of a global network economy is the stuff of business survival. Yet nowhere is the trauma of adjustment being felt more keenly than within the communications industry itself. After more than a century of stable development, the structure of the telecommunications value chain is undergoing total transformation, and it is happening in real time.

Like today's telecommunications value chain the key to the multimedia value chain of tomorrow will be in maintaining control of the customer - the ability to understand customer requirements and trends, the ability to control the distribution of value along the chain. Where the telecommunications and multimedia value chains differ, however, is that infrastructure owners, in most cases the incumbent telecommunications operators, will no longer command exclusive channel to the customer. Rather, it will be shared among network operators, content providers, systems integrators, and multiple market entrants. Even today digital technology and the arrival of competition have rendered the structure of the existing telecommunications value chain and its pricing methodologies incoherent. Yet those vestiges that remain are increasingly denying the benefits of next generation networks to individual and corporate consumers alike.

The central paradox of the convergence era is that while the telecommunications operators are the investors, owners and gatekeepers of the vast, global fibre optic network that has grown up over the past decade, the content and computing conglomerates are basing their expansion plans on the assumption that bandwidth will be free and access open. This stark clash. in cultures is indicative of a huge power play among industrial interests, the outcome of which will set the pace and character of the communications revolution. Already, multimedia applications are emerging that can only profitably be handled by tomorrow's pricing and delivery mechanisms. But until the relics of the old telecommunications order are swept away - relics of pricing, ownership, regulation and technology - the goal of a truly Global Information Infrastructure (GII) will remain elusive.

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