A PRIVATE INTERNET (NYT story off the Net) (yes I know it is cr and thus ask for

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 20:51:28 -0700
From: Jonathan Prince <aa078 () ra cs ohiou edu>




Hey folks,
        I got this free off the Net, I hope it contributes to the
discussion about the coming privatization of the Internet.


        My own feelings are: If its not broke, why fix it?


        Jonathan Prince
----------------------------------------------------------------


   A PRIVATE INTERNET: INEVITABLE BUT WORRISOME


   By PETER H. LEWIS


   c.1994 N.Y. Times News Service


    Having succeeded beyond its wildest dreams in nurturing the Internet
   computer web into a vital national communications system, the federal
   government has begun turning over to the private sector the job of
   operating and maintaining the network's major arteries.


   Some experts say the government's planned withdrawal from Internet
   management - ending nearly a decade of oversight and an estimated $12
   million in annual subsidies - is the best way to bring marketplace
   efficiencies to the increasingly commercial global network.


   But pessimists worry that this critical part of the emerging
   electronic web could become a patchwork of private roads, perhaps
   isolating some users.


   Some people are also concerned that the private system may not be able
   to cope with the billions of packets of information that traverse the
   network each month. The transition is already behind schedule as a
   result of technical and administrative delays.


   But the optimists and gloom-mongers agree on at least one thing: the
   government's plan to phase out subsidies will lead to fundamental
   changes in the economics and use of the computer network for more than
   2,000 universities, research organizations and government agencies.


   It is unclear whether the academic and research communities will have
   to pay more as a result of the declining subsidies, since increased
   competition among service providers and steadily lower costs for
   network capacity - known as bandwidth - could offset the difference
   before the system becomes commercially self-sufficient in five years.


   "College research institutions make very heavy use of the Internet,
   and they have been able to do it partly because of NSF funding,"
   Connolly said. "When that goes away, costs are going to be a major
   concern, especially for smaller colleges."


   Even if the costs to schools do not increase, Connolly said, the
   prospect of a commercial Internet provider billing the school for
   usage, perhaps broken down to a departmental or individual level,
   "raises a chilling effect of limiting everybody's use of resources."


   And no one can yet predict the impact of the transfer on the
   phenomenal growth of the Internet, which already has millions of
   computer users and is doubling in size each year.


   "New business practices and pricing models are going to have to emerge
   as the Internet enters this brave new world and becomes self
   sufficient," said Jordan Becker, a vice president of Advanced Network
   Services of Elmsford, N.Y., an Internet subcontractor for the
   government that now plans to find new commercial users for the main
   network being vacated by the government.


   At issue is a nationwide "backbone" network for the Internet, operated
   under the supervision of the government's main scientific and
   technical agency, the National Science Foundation.


   Although the roots of the Internet go back 25 years, the seeds for its
   current growth were planted less than a decade ago with the formation
   of the NSF Net, devised by the National Science Foundation to allow
   high-speed communications among a handful of supercomputer research
   centers and researchers at remote academic and government
   organizations.


   The NSF Net quickly evolved into an increasingly important conduit for
   tens of thousands of computer networks around the globe.


   To some extent, the NSF Net's role has already been assumed in part by
   purely commercial networks that bypass the backbone. Transferring the
   remaining NSF Net functions to private industry is in keeping with the
   outline for the National Information Infrastructure that is at the
   center of the Clinton administration's plan for a global information
   web.


    (STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS)


    Once freed from the responsibilities of supervising and supporting
   the backbone, the National Science Foundation plans to turn its
   attention to creating a separate high-speed network specifically for
   the original audience of scientific and academic researchers.


   The plan to phase out the National Science Foundation's role was
   announced in 1992, but has encountered delays.


   The current timetable calls for the first phase of the private-sector
   handoff to be completed on Oct. 31, when an assortment of important
   regional Internet service providers are scheduled to be disconnected
   from the NSF Net backbone and connected to four new, commercial
   network hubs, in San Francisco, Chicago, Washington and Pennsauken,
   N.J., a suburb of Philadelphia.


   Although further delays now seem certain, most experts still expect
   the technical transition to be complete by the middle of next year.


   "Quite frankly, this has taken longer than expected," said Don
   Mitchell, technical staff associate at the National Science Foundation
   in Arlington, Va. "Originally we thought we would have been
   transitioned by this point."


   No one disputes that this increasing commercialization of the Internet
   will accelerate its transformation away from an esoteric
   communications system for American computer scientists and into an
   international system for the flow of data, text, graphics, sound and
   video among businesses, their customers, and their suppliers.


   "I see the commercial users of the Internet to be the big winners
   here," Becker said. "From an engineering standpoint, I don't think the
   new structure is any better than the old structure. But it will help
   to broaden the market, and that will bring in more customers and more
   new applications, and the industry will grow as a result of it."


   Unlike the nation's telephone system, which is heavily regulated and
   which has standard fees and rules for the exchange of messages between
   carriers, the Internet is a free-wheeling and often chaotic web that
   has grown without central regulation. The one semblance of a central
   authority has been the NSF Net. In order to gain access to the
   backbone, Internet service providers have to agree to carry messages
   for one another.


   "The danger," Becker said, "is that you could have islands of
   connectivity, with providers who serve particular customers or regions
   but who don't connect to other providers, because they're not
   obligated under law to do so."


   Another fear is that some technical experts say the Internet's
   proposed new framework is based in part on a technology that has not
   been proved capable of handling high volumes of data traffic.


   "I don't think anyone has large amounts of confidence that they will
   work as advertised," said Edward M. Vielmetti, vice president for
   research at MSEN Inc., an Ann Arbor, Mich., company that sells
   Internet services to companies and individuals.


   The new architecture of the U.S. portion of the global Internet is
   based on three primary "network access points" that serve as regional
   hubs for traffic that formerly crossed the NSF Net backbone.


   These three primary network access points are in San Francisco,
   operated by Pacific Bell; in Chicago, operated by Ameritech; and in
   Pennsauken, N.J., operated by Sprint. A fourth access point, in
   Washington, is operated by Metropolitan Fiber Systems Inc.


   The San Francisco and Chicago sites are based on a data communications
   technology called asynchronous transfer mode, or ATM. Although it has
   been adopted by some companies for use in corporate data networks, it
   has never been used on a scale approaching Internet traffic.


   Perhaps for that reason, the San Francisco and Chicago sites are
   lagging behind the others in signing up customers among regional
   Internet companies.





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||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||  Jonathan Prince
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|||||||LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL||  614-593-7490 or
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||Rural Action  &  South East Ohio Regional Free-Net||  614-593-3228<fax>
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||  aa078 () seorf ohiou edu


==> Try out our new Free-Net! telnet://seorf.ohiou.edu/ (login as guest) <==







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||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||  Jonathan Prince
||LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL|||||||    Rural Action
|||LL  LLLLL  LL  LLL      LL        LLLLL    LL||||||    VISTA for SEORF
||||LL  LLL  LLL  LL  LLLLLLLLLL  LLLLLLL  LL  LL|||||  1 Mound Street
|||||LL  L  LLLL  LLLLL   LLLLLL  LLLLLL        LL||||  Athens, Ohio
||||||LL  LLLLLL  LL     LLLLLLL  LLLLL  LLLLLL  LL|||      45701
|||||||LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL||  614-593-7490 or
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||  614-592-8506<beeper>
||Rural Action  &  South East Ohio Regional Free-Net||  614-593-3228<fax>
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||  aa078 () seorf ohiou edu


==> Try out our new Free-Net! telnet://seorf.ohiou.edu/ (login as guest) <==