Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: EFF, Educom & HR1757
From: gnu () toad com <gnu () toad com>
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 93 15:05:50 -0700
Pres Smith said, to nren-discuss:
it authorizes giving away of a taxpayer investment of billions of dollars over a 20+year period to industry with only a trickle of of support for general education, k12 and public access.
Which particular taxpayer investment of billions of dollars is being given away, and to whom? The Internet technology (TCP/IP, all the higher level protocols, routing technology, more than a thousand RFC's) was all given away as it was done. Public money was spent, and the public reaped the results. I didn't hear any screaming when DARPA funded UC Berkeley to write a good implementation of TCP/IP and give it away so that universities and industry could adopt it and produce highly functional workstations and minicomputers. If you are talking about the physical infrastructure, very little of that was bought by NSF. All the phone lines are leased, not owned. The entire 56K ARPAnet has been dismantled and thrown away. The entire T1 NSFnet has been dismantled and thrown away. The only thing that remains is the T3 NSFnet, and that only costs $10M/year in inflated ANS prices. Total subsidy there is <<$100M. And I'm not sure that failing to fund it in a subsequent year counts as "giving it away". When I lease a T1 line for a few years, and then stop funding it because I don't need it any more, am I "giving it away" to the phone company?
... with only a trickle of of support for general education, k12 and public access.
The existing NSFnet certainly doesn't provide more than a trickle for general education or k12, and none at all for public access. All the public access to the Internet that has ever existed, was provided by commercial or nonprofit companies -- like Portal, Netcom, the Well, the World, Panix (for individual user access), and Alternet, PSI, Sprint, and others for publicly available TCP/IP hookups to private machines (individual and corporate). NSF has been `standing in the schoolhouse door' -- making it harder to integrate public access with their `research and education' network -- not the other way around. I'm cofounder of a nonprofit community cooperative providing Internet services in the SF Bay Area -- the Little Garden network. Our local regional, Barrnet, blanched when we told them we were actively hooking peoples' home machines up to the Internet at $100/month; they can't do it for three times the price. But we get nothing but stonewalling from NSF. Like, we tried to hook up to the NSF network to pass our noncommercial traffic, but it turns out they have abrogated responsibility for the NSFnet routers to the local fiefdoms, which won't let anyone else connect up. Whenever there's a policy question, there's a whole hierarchy of organizations to point fingers at -- NSF, MERIT, ANS, the regionals -- and nobody's responsible for anything. We publicly asked Steve Wolff three years ago what the real rules for what traffic can move over NSFnet are (e.g. can I send email via NSFnet to someone at another commercial company? How can I even tell whether my message traverses NSFnet?). His response was to point me to their mealymouthed `policy', which doesn't answer any of these questions. Meanwhile, Wolff has personally excercised censorship over NSFnet sites that were completely legal according to the published policy, threatening to cut off both MIT and the entire country of Finland, from the NSFnet -- because he thought reactionary Congressmen might not want to see a particular kind of sexual free speech happening over `their' network. If this is NSF's idea of professional service, academic freedom, and public access, we get a better deal from Prodigy. At least the censorship there is formal, published policy, as is the price and terms. Mr. Smith, what, exactly, is your complaint with the process of removing the government from the direct purchase of network services for education and research? John Gilmore
Current thread:
- Re: EFF, Educom & HR1757 Pres Smith (Jul 14)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: EFF, Educom & HR1757 gnu (Jul 14)
- Re: EFF, Educom & HR1757 David Farber (Jul 14)