Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix

[Miles Fidelman <mfidelman () meetinghouse net>]

Hi Randy,

Randy Bush wrote:
> > And, for the record, it's pretty widely acknowledge that "The World"
> > (Barry Shein) was the world's first commercial ISP - offering shell
> > access in 1989, and at some point started offering PPP dial-up
> > services.  As I recall, they were a UUnet POP.
> yep.  and uunet and psi were hallucinations.  can we please not rewrite
> well-known history?

umm what history am I re-writing?
http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/ - is as good a source as 
any for Internet history, which says this under 1990
"The World comes on-line (world.std.com), becoming the first commercial 
provider of Internet dial-up access says"
ok - one can quibble 1989 (what Barry states on World's home page)

PSInet was very late 1989, so there was that, I believe UUnet was 1990

What I did forget was NEARnet - which embarrasses me, since I was at BBN 
at the time.  But, at first, NEARnet limited access to the NSFnet 
backbone to it's non-commercial customers (at least that was the policy 
- I'm not sure that filtering was ever really turned on in the 
gateways).  I don't recall whether CSnet had any commercial members.

> or are you equating shell access with isp?  that would be novel.  unix
> shell != internet.

well now we get to rehash to very old definitional distinction between 
"Internet Access Provider" and "Internet Service Provider"

and yes, if a service provider takes money, to provide access to the 
Internet in some way, shape, manner, or form, yes - that's providing 
Internet "access" or "service" - and as soon as dial-up included PPP, 
then that's a non-issue
> btw, not do denigrate what barry did.  a commercial unix bbs connected
> to the real internet was significant.  the left coasties were doing free
> stuff, the well, community memory, ...  and barry created a viable bbs
> commercial service which still survives (i presume).  a significant
> achievement.

The other service Barry provided was pushing the whole issue of 
commercial access to the backbone.  That was kind of epic.

And yes, they're still going strong.  I still maintain an account - it's 
my backup for the rare case that I need a separate site for diagnosing 
issues with our cluster.

Cheers,

Miles


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra