The material concentrates largely on developments within the United States, but readers from other countries will also find the overall framework quite useful and informative. It has generally incorporated a broad, public-interest perspective, but is now reaching its operational and capacity design limits while also experiencing increasing commercialisation. Design of the NII will require balancing competing desires and visions from different sectors of society, and will inevitably involve difficult trade-offs. For instance, the government's goals in the NII are economic development and international competitiveness. The U.S. military hopes to expand international data gathering activities.
Educators wish to use the NII to let students see the world as their classroom.
Citizen activists hope the NII will strengthen democracy and civil society. These include regulation via market rules and taxes, encouraging production via subsidies or no-risk incentives, promoting consumption via consumer subsidies, and creation of an infrastructure. Currently, however, it seems that U.S. NII policy is being determined primarily by private negotiations between congressional staff and industry lobbyists from the telecommunications and TV sectors. The private players each want to maximise their share of this revenue, through expansion of transmission pipes, hardware and software, content, and online services. Patterns of competition among such industries have included mergers within each transmission industry, cross-media horizontal mergers, and vertical integration from source to reception.