[10931] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
why not make the VBNS a black budget military contract?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gordon Cook)
Mon Mar 14 23:44:38 1994
From: cook@path.net (Gordon Cook)
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 1994 14:05:29 PST
To: com-priv@psi.com
Cc: cook@pandora.sf.ca.us
I am learning a bit more about how the self-perpetuating aristocracy inside the
beltway has worked to give us the next five to 7.5 years of MERIT, IBM, MCI, ANS
and NT.
You define an ostensibly research service that you are gonna spend taxpayer
money on. Because this research service is open to some university
computational science types, your legal depantment can say it is done for the
benefit of the R&E community as well as the gov't and can therefor be a
cooperative agreement rather than a contract.
You then hold discussions with identifiable members of the community at large
about what you solicitation will request. However when you get raked over the
coals in the response to your draft solicitation, you then go essentially into
executive session with a group of insiders whose names you do not reveal in
order to plan your ultimate objective. 9 months later and a year behind your
self imposed schedule you come out with a solicitation subtly tailored to the
incumbents.
Now we get to the interesting part:
Not having publically released the names of those upon whom you relied to draft
the final product, you recruit a review panel. The review panel (many of whom
are probably among those who shaped the soliciation itself) is told that their
participation in the review will be confidential and that presumably their names
will never be publically released even to a FOIA request.
The ostensibly independent review panel, whose identities only those inside the
castle will ever know, then does its work. The proposal of the incumbent is
judged technically superior. And then they look at the prices..... Gosh, what
do you know, the incumbent is even better.
And what is more interesting, the solicitation itself is the criterion for
judging technical merit. So even if an review panel member who is not from the
inner circle thinks the solicitation's aim is flawed, or that someone has come
up with a better way in the mean time, he or she must grade the proposals on how
close they come to giving NSF what it asked for not on what he or she believes
to be the most sound approach.
And where are the checks and balances? Where can we be assured that the
composition of the review panel isn't the same as those insiders who finally
crafted the solicitation??? We can't because everything is held in incestuous
confidence. Right up to the DNCRI director who makes the final decision, get's
the rubber stamp from his boss and the next rubber stamp from the new NSF
director to the National Science board which, meeting in executive session, is
told certain things about the proposed award that are privileged and proprietary
and then applies its own rubber stamp as the culmination of a supposedly
democratic process. With the result that 4 weeks later the public has still not
seen any detail about the winning proposal because MCI really hasn't won yet
since Steve - having the authorization he wants - hasn't yet signed the document
on the bottom line.
Why not just turn this into a black budget military contract and get it out of
the public eye entirely?
The real trouble is that they are wasting the taxpayer's money instead of
spending it on real leadership. MCI, which does not have a commercial service
as opposed to sprint and at&t that do is given $50 million to learn how to get
into and establish themselves in the very high speed atm data networking
business. And Congress having been sold the bill of goods by Mike Nelson and
other staffers that the "NREN" program as presently established was going to
enhance our technology capabilitity sits blissfully by as we the american people
pay for MCI's to get up to speed and compete commercially against the
supercomputer center high speed ATM network program that Sprint released last
fall.
