The UK government and its agencies must take the lead in the development and use of the information superhighway – such was the conclusion of the first meeting on the subject held by the CCTA, the Government Centre for Information Systems. The CCTA, formerly the Central Communications & Technology Agency (the initials no longer stand for anything), said the government is the natural investor in the superhighway, being involved already in Janet and SuperJanet, the networks connecting 12 UK universities with a 150M-bit per second Datastream. The Government has already deregulated the telecommunications industry in the UK, making it cheaper and with more choice than anywhere else in Europe, although still much more expensive than the US. But, said the CCTA, it must now take a lead in using the superhighway. To endorse this, Robert Hughes, minister for public service and science, became the first minister on the Internet as his speech to the meeting was published on CCTA’s Internet Government Information Service. Following swiftly on his heels was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kenneth Clarke, whose Budget speech was available from the government server on the Internet within an hour of his finishing in the House of Commons. This server has already given out 130,000 narrow cast electronic information brochures since its launch four weeks year ago and is generating more interest than its American equivalent. The role of the government is not as a regulator, as bureaucracy cannot keep pace with technological developments, according to the CCTA. Rather information about the work of others and communications should be made easily available. The CCTA said there is no place for an information superhighway regulatory body as the existing Office of Telecommunications already carried out the regulation necessary for the industry. Government agencies, however, face problems with the ready availability on information across the Internet and the information superhighway generally. Their charters demanded they recoup costs from selling the information they gathered. But taxpayers and Internet users feel that they have already paid for the information through taxation. The agencies’ problems were not helped by vague copyright laws regarding the Internet. Hughes described the Superhighway as the moonshot of the 1990s, with the capability to have a direct practical effect on ordinary people. But Mark Gladwin, head of the CCTA, pointed out that in this case, unlike the moonshot, people were not sure which moon to aim at, if this was a moon, or how they were going to get there. Also, whereas the moon shot cost the US government thousands of millions of dollars, the CCTA expected costs of the superhighway to borne by the private sector.
