[12] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Breaking network funding out of central planning
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Gilmore)
Wed Oct 17 15:32:14 1990
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 90 11:02:16 PDT
From: gnu@toad.com (John Gilmore)
To: com-priv@psi.com
Dan Schlitt <dan@sci.ccny.cuny.edu> wrote:
> Questions like "Is it worth more to my project to fund a post-doc or
> network access?" immediately arise. Funding for what I will call for
> lack of a better term "infrastructure" will tend to lose out. The
> post-doc will contribute in a direct way to continued funding while
> the contribution of network access to grant success is nebulous.
I think it would be better to answer the question than to evade it. If
the net's contribution to the grant's success is nebulous, then why
should we fund a net connection for those folks? A post-doc will
actually give you more research for the buck. It's exactly Dan's kind
of fuzzy thinking that the current setup encourages.
If the network can't justify itself, it should go away. More importantly,
those people who would rather use the money for something else ought to
be able to. Time will tell whether they were right or the net partisans
were right. The essence of our culture and our vitality is in diversity.
(A policy of diversity rather than central planning can easily fail,
however, if there is no penalty for making wrong decisions, e.g. if
your grant gets renewed year after year regardless of your lack of
results. In a free market this only goes on as long as somebody thinks
of it as an investment in future results. Under central planning it
can go on as long as the people involved have 'pull' or connections.)
> Monolithic policy based funding of resources like the Internet has its
> drawbacks. But it does add certainty to the continued existence of
> the resource.
Exactly -- whether the resource is useful or not.
--
John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com
Just say no to thugs. The ones who lock up innocent drug users come to mind.
