Internet: commercial or not?

[L. Detweiler <ld231782 () longs lance colostate edu>]

...
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'?)

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