Thirty-two years ago today, on December 21, 1993 (November 9, 1993), the US information superhighway policy took shape. On December 21, 1993, US Vice President Al Gore said that the US government's policy on the "information superhighway" has taken shape and will soon be submitted to Congress for discussion in the form of a draft law. "Information superhighway" is one of the hottest topics in the United States this year. The so-called "information superhighway" refers to the proposed national information network linking universities, research institutions, enterprises and ordinary American households in the United States. It is an infrastructure for the purpose of information exchange. The name, terminology, and design of this information infrastructure are all borrowed from the transportation infrastructure that began to be built in the 1950s and has served as one of the pillars of the US economy for the past few decades - the Interstate Highway Network. It is also an infrastructure, and the "information superhighway" is as important as, and may even exceed, the highway. The technical conditions for establishing an "information superhighway" are basically mature, and it can be applied only by commercial adjustment and testing. Data, text, sound, images, and television programs can be sent and received through telephone lines, cable TV transmission lines, or wireless telephone networks. The future "information superhighway" will integrate the functions of existing computer networking services, telephone, and cable TV, and become a carrier for an extremely wide range of services in education, health, entertainment, commerce, and finance. The biggest difference from existing one-way media, such as television, is that the "information superhighway" will be a two-way communication, making information consumers active providers of information. The creation of a national information network was proposed by Clinton and Gore last year. Shortly after they took office in January, Clinton authorized the establishment of the "Information Infrastructure Task Force," led by Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and composed of Vice President Al Gore, Laura Tyson, chairperson of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, and a group of economic, legal, technical and telecommunications industry representatives. After months of careful preparation, the core members of the task force have recently met at the White House every week for discussions. In his speech on the 21st, Gore pointed out that the government's policy to develop an "information superhighway" is based on five principles: first, to encourage private enterprises to increase investment; second, to promote and protect competition among private enterprises; third, to provide the public with access to services; fourth, to avoid "inequality" in information ownership; fifth, to maintain flexibility in technological design. Gore emphasized that in order to adapt to the needs of the "information superhighway" and create an environment conducive to the realization of this ambitious plan, the Clinton administration supported amending the Communications Act of 1934 to eventually eliminate administrative and legal restrictions on various telecommunications industries such as cable, telephone, television and satellite. Gore believes that the "information superhighway" will be completed in ten to fifteen years. What is an "information superhighway"? The "information superhighway" that the United States plans to build in the next 10 to 15 years is the product of the development and integration of computer technology and communication technology. It will form the backbone of the flow of information in the information age. The implementation of this plan will bring "revolutionary changes" to the way Americans work, study, shop and live. The official name of the "information superhighway" is "National Information Infrastructure", which is abbreviated by the English acronym NII. Similar to the situation in which the US transportation network can directly reach factories, schools, hospitals, entertainment facilities and almost all households, the designers of the "information superhighway" hope to build an information network with the same degree of popularity, so that Americans can access information extremely conveniently. The most powerful tool for information exchange in the information age is the computer. With the large-scale popularity of personal computers in the United States, the flow of information between tens of millions of computers mainly depends on the transmission of binary data in telephone lines. Although the penetration rate of telephones in the United States is now as high as 93%. But the channel of information exchange between computers is still only equivalent to many "small paths" when the car first appeared for technical reasons. Speed, capacity and efficiency cannot be improved, and the path is not very smooth. The future "information highway" will be an additional "thoroughfare" in addition to the existing "small roads". After data is compressed, it can be quickly transmitted on the "highway" at thousands of times the speed. The "road surface" is paved with optical fibers. A typical optical fiber cable has a diameter of less than 1.3 cm and contains 32 fiberglass filaments the thickness of a hair. Under the current technical conditions, each optical fiber can transport about 5,000 TV channels of image signals and 500,000 telephone voice signals, but the actual utilization rate is only one thousandth of this capacity. Given the huge potential of optical fibers, the "information superhighway" will not only become a data transmission medium, but also transport TV, telephone, teaching, finance and other services, becoming the most significant communication revolution since the United States began to popularize telephones on a large scale in the 1950s.