[11046] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
What is an "Internet reseller"?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Erik E. Fair" (Your Friendly Postm)
Fri Mar 18 19:56:11 1994
From: "Erik E. Fair" (Your Friendly Postmaster) <fair@apple.com>
In-Reply-To: <m0phhFu-000BbnC@mercury.mcs.com>
To: com-priv@psi.com
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 94 13:13:28 -0800
I'm sure everyone here has heard of America Online. They are selling
Internet access too. It started with just E-mail, but (if they haven't
already) they will be providing WAIS, Gopher, WWW, and FTP service to
their customers, all umpty-thousand of them. Telnet to come later.
The amusing thing is that the customers will not be getting SLIP/PPP;
these services will be delivered over a proprietary communications and
graphical interface technology. Ping will not work.
Is America Online reselling Internet service?
How does this differ from shell access on a terminal dialup UNIX host?
Why do some of you persist in believing that handing out IP addresses
makes it qualitatively different? Bandwidth is bandwidth.
This whole mess comes about because NSP's will not engineer their
networks to carry the total aggregate inputs - too expensive. So, they
guess at an average usage per customer, and then frantically restrict
anything that violates that assumption, with lots of handwaving.
Erik E. Fair apple!fair fair@apple.com
