ABSTRACT
Meganet has created its own bumper-sticker vocabulary—information highway, communications revolution, multimedia millennium, computer explosion, global village, and so on. Meganet holds out the promise of dramatically reducing, within a generation, this global disparity. If this potential is realized, it will be because political, economic, and technological forces now favor the completion of a world network. This convergence of forces is rapidly gaining momentum. The favorable public response to the information highway proposal energized the administration, Congress, the corporate sector, and public-interest groups to get down to work on a national legislative agenda for the information age. These efforts involved several years of bruising debate and lobbying in Washington, given the powerful interests involved in restructuring a major economic sector. The combined strength of big corporations and agile young challengers has sustained the US lead in Meganet developments. Inevitably, this lead is being challenged abroad as other industrialized countries climb aboard the information highway bandwagon.
