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Confidential: 1996 Internet World's Fair
- To: marty, luther, steph, systems
- Subject: Confidential: 1996 Internet World's Fair
- From: Carl Malamud <carl>
- Date: Mon, 8 Aug 1994 15:51:34 -0400
- Org: Internet Multicasting Service
This is a preliminary draft intended for limited circulation. Please return your comments to Carl Malamud (carl@radio.com) and check with me before redistributing the document.
Introduction: A Public Park for the Global Village
This is a proposal for a 1996 Internet World's Fair, an exposition similar in scope to the great World's Fairs of the beginning of the industrial age. This World's Fair will be located in multiple cities, connected together with high-speed telecommunications lines. This fair, like its industrial age counterparts will try and accomplish three goals:
1) Expose large numbers of people to the new technology. 2) Draw together engineers and industry to build a public works project for the global village. 3) Challenge engineers and industry to advance the state of the art by providing a highly visible place for people to show the results of their efforts.
World's Fairs Ushered in the Industrial Age
From 1848 to 1912, the world saw a series of Expositions and World's Fairs held in the great capitals of the world. From England's Crystal Palace to the great White City of Chicago's Columbian Exposition, these fairs ushered in the industrial age, guiding and focusing several generations of engineers and drawing in millions of people to learn what this new age of railroads and telephones and machines could do.
The World's Fairs served as magnets, attracting tourists from all over the world. The Midway in Chicago was the birthplace of George Ferris's wonderful new wheel and served as the inspiration for amusement centers in other cities such as New York's Coney Island. The Eiffel Tower of Paris and the Crystal Palace of England were two of the permanent monuments left behind, but the World's Fairs also served as the focal point for a society learning to cope with machines and industry. In city after city, the mounting of a World's Fair always left a decisive impact, a permanent change in how the parks and roads and lights of that city operated.
Lewis Mumford said that "metropolis itself may be described as a World's Fair in continuous operation." The World's Fairs were early models of how to run our cities. Large lighting systems, electrical plants, telephones, mass transit, and most of our transportation and communication systems were nurtured in these environments that focused large groups of people on one large event. A typical World's Fair built a model city, with pavilions for different countries, large expositions of agriculture and industry, and cultural events. These miniature cities became the model for the world around them, influencing radically the development of London, Paris, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and the other cities where the World's Fairs were held.
A World's Fair for the Information Age
Over the last few years, we've seen the dawn of a global Internet, a network of computer networks connecting over 30 million people in 140 countries. The explosive growth of this global Internet leaves no doubt that we are witnessing the birth of an infrastructure as fundamental as lighting, mass transit, power, and he telephone. Gradually, we're seeing every computer in the world connect itself into this global grid.
This global village has been growing at a rate of 15-20 percent per month, but it is growing in the same wild uncontrolled way that railroads and other building blocks of the industrial age did in the early days. Many people have only vague notions of the exact nature of the revolution sweeping by them. We are building a global village, but are doing so in a haphazard fashion without any sense of community.
In the global Internet the lack of a shared vision of what an information age should look like is becoming more and more apparent. Government has plans for national and global information infrastructures, but many of these plans are random shots in the dark, attempts to control things without any vision of what we want our world to look like.
Likewise, industry is awash in attempts build a business environment for the information age. Many in industry understand that if we want people to spend money in the global village, people have to be enticed to visit. Many donation programs are being proposed, but many of these programs are random attempts to move equipment into schools, libraries, and other groups.
A third group searching for direction is the engineers that have helped build the global Internet, many of them doing so as unpaid volunteers. These are people who adopt schools, build networks at trade shows, and build networks in non-profit groups or research groups. This is a large population that can easily be mobilized behind a shared vision, particularly if resources are available from industry and government.
A World's Fair will bring together all three parties -- government, industry, and working engineers -- with a shared vision. The World's Fair will be our opportunity to build a public park for the global village, a place that emphasizes what a community looks like in an information age. These public parks in cyberspace will, like the industrial age fairs they are modeled on, expose large numbers of people to the technology and at the same time leave behind a permanent infrastructure to help drive the information economy forward.
The 1996 Internet World's Fair
We propose that a 1996 Internet World's Fair Commission be formed and tasked with coordinating the production of a World's Fair in multiple cities. We already have commitments for office space, computers, and assistance in Tokyo, San Francisco, Washington, and Amsterdam. Cities could be added and/or deleted later in the process, depending on factors ranging from the degree of local commitment to the availability of telecommunications resources.
The aim is to build a truly distributed World's Fair, but one that shares the same characteristics as the industrial age fairs:
1) expose several million people to the new technology 2) challenge engineers to do something new 3) leave behind a permanent piece of public infrastructure
The unifying technical piece in the World's Fair is the Internet Railroad, dedicated bandwidth between the participating cities that connects large servers together. The Internet Railroad connects the cities together, and allows the Internet Railroad Commission to systematically move data around between the servers. This data can be simple data archives, but might also include real-time audio and video sessions.
In Washington, D.C., the headquarters city for the fair, there will be a Cyberspace Planetarium, a place on the Washington Mall where people can come in and get a tour of cyberspace. This Cyberspace Planetarium will also serve as the home for two of the regular events at the World's Fair:
1) The Internet Town Hall will be a forum for world leaders to talk to citizens around the world. More than just a one-shot media event, the Internet Town Hall will try and bring all the resources of the global Internet to promote a serious discussion of public affairs over a period of time.
2) The Global Schoolhouse allows children around the world to work together and do real research on a public affairs issue, such as the environment. The children are then able to present their research results to each other and to world leaders.
The Cyberspace Planetarium and events such as the Internet Town Hall and the Global Schoolhouse are an attempt to address the issue of reaching out to new communities. These new communities are crucial if the global Internet is to grow and become a useful part of our society. The World's Fair and the events surrounding it will help show the potential of this new technology.
The World's Fair is built on an Internet Railroad, a systematic attempt to move large amounts of data between computers around the world. The railroad can also be used to build global digital libraries, permanent public resources that encourage people to move to the global village. These large digital libraries will encourage private industry to form new businesses on the information highway. We propose that government challenge itself in this area, putting patent, trademark, and other vital data resources online.
Building and managing the railroad allows data on large servers around the globe to be coordinated. The railroad can also be used for other purposes. For example, the global gigabit testbeds around the world can be linked together. During certain periods, the railroad can be "booked" to allow these testbeds around the world to test interoperability or to pool compute resources from around the world into a virtual teraflop computer.
Can It Be Done?
An Internet World's Fair is an ambitious undertaking, but one that is well within the realm of possibility. Many of the resources already exist, and government and industry can work together to provide the rest. The shared excitement of a global World's Fair will provide the motivation to stage an event that can be a defining moment in the beginning years of the information age.
The high-speed telecommunications lines linking the globe are one of the biggest expenses for such an event. It is possible that the telecommunications industry could be persuaded to provide resources to link the U.S. with Europe and the Pacific Rim. The motivation to the industry is that this World's Fair, if successful, will help spark a large consumer market for their services. Putting core public data online on the Internet Railroad will stimulate demand and help build markets for other forms of data, such as entertainment and business information. Senior officials in the telecommunications industry have indicated that under the right political conditions, such a donation would be likely.
In each of the cities, we would need a large, managed server. Talks in the computer industry have already proven quite productive and it is likely that these servers will be donated. In addition, several consulting firms and other online providers have indicated they would be willing to donate personnel to design and manage the core network infrastructure.
The Internet Railroad is already being built between Tokyo, Washington, D.C., and London. The software to run and manage the railroad is being developed with researchers at Columbia University, the University of Colorado, Keio University, and other locations. Linking the gigabit testbed programs around the world would require the testbeds to run links to the edge of the railroad depot.
Many of the pieces are thus in place or ready to go. What we need is for government to take the vision of a 1996 Internet World's Fair and make it their vision of one of the steps to take towards building a Global Information Infrastructure. A World's Fair would be both symbolic and real, giving vision to currently vague plans for building an information superhighway.
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