[11086] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: ANS and the CIX - have they really connected?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gordon Cook)
Mon Mar 21 21:04:29 1994
From: cook@path.net (Gordon Cook)
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 1994 22:59:21 GMT
In-Reply-To: karl@mcs.com (Karl Denninger)
"Re: ANS and the CIX - have they really connected?" (Mar 19, 10:31pm)
To: karl@mcs.com, stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com
Cc: gwh@crl.com, matthew@echo.com, com-priv@psi.com, fair@apple.com,
washburn@cix.org
Let me hazard a guess at what is separating the "snarkers"
from the position that karl is advocating. Could it be that the
folks who are saying that the CIX represents an unacceptable barrier
to entry are stuck in the old network mindset when all one
had to do was hook up to the infrastructure providsed by NSF and boom
they had all the glories of the primarily R&E net spread out before
them.
Now the matter is different. Depending on how you define it, the
net is already primarily commercial or about to become that way. This
commercial has its own infrastructure to pay for. The NSF is not
picking up the tab for routing and interconnect costs. The commercial
players have set up CIX as the means of doing that. If you want access
to the non taxpayer funded comercial net, you have to pay the CIX fee
which in all likelihood is far cheaper than what you have to pay if you
were helping Al Weis and IBM build THEIR gigabit backbone if THEY had
been successful in imposing THEIR model on the emerging commercial
network... that then barriers to entry would have been higher and the
cost of net usage more expensive.
Its true that you have a ten thousand dollar fee that in 1990 wasn't
there but it is also true that this fee is the price of entry into a
network that is nw commercialized and it is also true thatthis fee
is very liekly much less than any of the alternative scenarios would
have imposed.
