[1134] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Forwarded from PACS-L Digest
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Martin Lee Schoffstall)
Fri Aug 9 12:26:18 1991
To: Stephen Wolff <steve@ncri.cise.nsf.gov>
Cc: edtjda@magic322.chron.com (Joe Abernathy), kessler@ocf.berkeley.edu,
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 09 Aug 91 09:55:09 EDT."
Date: Fri, 09 Aug 91 12:22:28 -0400
From: "Martin Lee Schoffstall" <schoff@psi.com>
The MCI and Compuserve mail systems are experimentally gatewayed to the
Internet in such a way that (1) the Internet does not allow traffic between
the two commercial nets, (2) the Internet cannot be used as a transit net
for either commercial net, and (3) Internet users incur no charges.
At the "international connections" meeting at NSF this week - this issue
was also discussed. One "proposal" that was discussed was moving all the
commercial email providers to the equivalent of a "Electronic Mail Exchange
(EMX)" so that they could talk to each other without restriction using
the "lingua franca" of smtp/rfc822. The EMX could then be connected
to the CIX/NEX whatever.
ANS thought this was a good idea, (an actual area of agreement!). They
pointed out that there were at least two groups already working on this
and that there was a lot of money to be made doing it.
One of the parties working on it is of course the various VAN's using X.400
"interfacing". They have been driven for years by the AIA (Aerospace
Industries Association) to do this interconnect. When this is operational
across all the vendors is one of the many OSI questions of this decade.
Until then the more simple solution of RFC822/SMTP works (technically)
to "all of them" if you start at the center of the network universe -
the Internet.
Your guess is as good as mine on who the other party is proposing to do
this......
Marty
PS: We really need Peter to talk about the NEX soon, or I'm going to
take his presentation (I have a copy) and probably misrepresent
it, by having insufficient context.
