[11289] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Universities (was: What is an "Internet reseller"?)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Doran)
Mon Mar 28 11:01:47 1994
To: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 26 Mar 1994 10:57:01 PST."
<199403261857.KAA02193@netcom9.netcom.com>
Date: Sun, 27 Mar 1994 15:49:42 -0800
From: Sean Doran <smd@cesium.clock.org>
In message <199403261857.KAA02193@netcom9.netcom.com>, Glenn S. Tenney writes:
[A co-op wants]
| to pay for the service they receive (ie. pay their NSP the going rate), but
| (a) don't believe that they are resellers
[If MIT wants CIX access they]
| would have to pay for it, as would any university charging
| students for net or computer access. If not, then the co-op I mentioned
| surely shouldn't have to either. Let me anticipate a point... Yes, the
| co-op members would each chip in their share of expenses, but MIT charges
| each student too so what's the difference?
John Curran pointed out that MIT only sells access to people directly
affiliated with MIT. Consequently, MIT is providing service only to
people and groups which are legally under the auspices of MIT, and MIT
presumably takes on full liability for them.
The situation would be quite different if MIT provided services to the
general public or to unrelated corporations.
If a co-op came to me as a group of people asking for a single, shared
connection, I would consider them as an MIT-style customer if they
showed up with a document of incorporation, and agreed to take full
liability for *all* their members and agreed to idemnify me for
anything beyond getting traffic from my backbone to their router. I'd
also ask them to agree to strict limits on technical support (a single
point of contact for all matters), and would assign a single CIDR
route to them. Finally, the last test would be that their definition
of who is a member of the co-op does not include members of the
general public or corporations of any nature.
In fact, this is what I did do, before I quit UUNET Canada. It worked
quite well, too.
This deals with the three things that cause most NSPs difficulty: legal
responsibility, technical support overhead, and subsidizing direct
competition. So long as the co-op appears to be essentially the same
on those fronts as any corporate or university customer or member, I
doubt any NSP or the CIX would have problems treating you in exactly
the way you want.
Sean.
