[1191] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
ANS Competitor to Announce?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Abernathy)
Wed Aug 14 17:20:14 1991
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 91 16:03:01 CDT
From: edtjda@magic322.chron.com (Joe Abernathy)
To: com-priv@psi.com
Cc: steve@ncri.cise.nsf.gov
Just got advance word that a significant commercial high-performance computing
initiative will be announced soon. It's not AT&T, but that's the kind of
company you ought to be thinking about. (My apologies; I'm not permitted to
disclose more information right now.)
I understand how difficult it is to manage the government's role in this
medium, but this sure seems like a worthy opportunity to address the issue
of what the network is, and is to become. Is the NSFNet a contract, or a
high-performance computing backbone? What is the permissible role of
alternatives to ANS, from the perspective of the National Science Foundation?
