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Internet: commercial or not?
From: L. Detweiler <ld231782 () longs lance colostate edu>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 93 23:35:29 -0600
... Read my words! as beautiful and promising as the Internet is today, it is just a small glimmer in the eye of future cyberspace, in which all traffic is unrestricted except in volume and cost per bit (the former prodigious and the latter piddly), so that commercial enterprise can flourish. We have already waited long enough. The current taboos on the internet [AUP's -- ed] will look quaintly archaic. Look at the way this guy below is whining because the NIC service had a `nice booth at InterOp' with enough cost to have funded `3-4 full time employees typing whois entries' and asks for an `audit' because of the possibility of (horrors) `advertising'. Yes, in the current dark ages I concede he has a valid point (they are funded in part by NSF grants), but this shows in crystalline clarity the absolutely chilling effect that government funding has on a project (e.g., the internet) in constraining its full commercial development. The greatest supporters are the greatest detractors! Where else would a company be criticized & investigated for having a classy booth at a trade convention (uh, Microsoft excepted)? When the whole cyberspace is unrestricted, though, I suppose he'll pop up complaining about the big companies with glossy booths that could have funded 20 children on Welfare. BTW, Network Information Center, database & catalogue of all internet services, while a thinly veiled approach likely to evolve into a full-fledged charging & advertising Cyberspatial Yellow Pages, is clearly a cornerstone of AT&T's new drive into the internet for the masses. (What is this guy referring to in the `attempt to reduce expected services as with Whois'?) ===cut=here===
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- Internet: commercial or not? L . Detweiler (Aug 27)