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Liberty And The Internet
While sex on the Internet and encryption export laws have grabbed most of the attention in Internet policy debates, human rights, freedom of speech and privacy are even hotter issues for the Global Internet Liberty Campaign (GILC). The organization just got financial backing from the Open Society Institute, part of the nonprofit Soros Foundation. Jonathan Peizer, CEO of Open Society Institute, says GILC is concerned about knee-jerk reactions of legislators when it comes to Internet content. Aside from more high-profile attempts to govern the Internet like the now-defunct Communications Decency Act, GILC members also band together to o ppose censorship in other countries, such as Germany's ban on hate language. The German government applied that law to the Internet earlier this year when CompuServe Germany's managing director was indicted for distributing pornography and violent gaming over the Internet. GILC, whose supporters include the ACLU, Amnesty International USA, Center for Democracy and Technology and Electronic Frontiers groups from Australia, Canada and Spain, went so far as to write German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to protest the CompuServe indictment.

The ISP Food Chain
Some Internet service providers (ISPs) will never see black ink. For them, the best they might hope for is dangling their customer base as bait for hooking a bigger fish in the ISP pond. According to Steve Korba, research consultant with Northern Business Information (NBI), the name of the game is market share for the big fish. Korba says traditional telephone companies still are not up to speed in the Internet services realm, so the future of the Internet is the public-switched data network, which will become a super-Internet of sorts during the next 20 to 30 years. The public-switched network will turn those big central-office switches into gigantic servers, says Korba, who co-authored a report on the U.S. ISP market ("U.S. Internet Service Provider Markets," 1997 edition). Switches like Nortel's Internet Thruway, which divert Internet traffic from the local telco switch to the public data network, are first glimpses of this trend. The secret weapon for telcos, of course, is good-old reliable uptime and accessibility, something many ISPs and online providers are struggling to achieve.

Korba says traditional ISPs can still turn a profit from opportunities like fee-based entertainment and wireless Internet telephony. So far, Korba says, no ISPs are tackling pricey cellular and Personal Communications Services (PCS) on the Internet telephony side. Chances are, wireless Internet telephony would be cheaper and more ubiquitous, while wired Internet telephony won't be profitable because it will cost as much as the public-switched network to build up the Internet to handle voice calls, Korba says.