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Building the Electronic Superhighway Credit...The New York Times ArchivesSee the article in its original context from
January 24, 1993
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Section 3,Page
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AMID all the sweetness and light at Bill Clinton's seminar on the economy last month came a not-so-harmonious exchange between Robert E. Allen, chief executive of A.T.&T., and Al Gore, then Vice President-elect.
The topic was the development of Mr. Clinton's No. 1 priority for improving the country's infrastructure: a national "superhighway" for data. This high-capacity, high-speed computer network could do for the flow of information -- words, music, movies, medical images, manufacturing blueprints and much more -- what the transcontinental railroad did for the flow of goods a century ago and the interstate highway system did in this century.
Mr. Gore said the enormous network of fiber-optic cable and sophisticated switches should be built by the Government. Mr. Allen disagreed.
"I was hoping we'd have one disagreement before lunch," Mr. Clinton quipped.
Polite and brief though it was, the discourse got to the heart of a widening dispute among some of the nation's most powerful industries, the new Administration and public-interest advocates. That dispute is over how best to build, and control, a project widely viewed as a national resource that would improve education, health care, scientific research and the ability of corporations to compete in the world economy, among many other things.
On A.T.&T.'s side are the nation's other long-distance phone companies, which own and operate the nation's voice communications network quite profitably and stand to lose big if they suddenly face competition from a more advanced network they don't control. They argue that the data superhighway should be built, owned and operated by private companies, including themselves. Agreeing with the long-distance carriers is a diverse group including opponents of industrial policy and those who say that Government can't afford to pay for a data superhighway, that a viable network could be fashioned much less expensively from the current telephone network. Gore's Argument
Mr. Gore argues that the private sector won't gamble on such a risky investment. Even if it did, he says, it would build not a superhighway available to all but rather a kind of private toll road open only to a business and scientific elite. He says a new national data highway should be a public network constructed and regulated by the Government for all Americans. Indeed, the whole project would be a key test for the industrial policy that Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore view as a way to revive the economy.
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