[12102] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Commercial Use of the Internet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen Wolff)
Thu May 5 18:04:16 1994
Date: Thu, 5 May 1994 11:37:08 -0500 (EDT)
From: Stephen Wolff <steve@nsf.gov>
To: info-nets@think.com, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <0097DEDA.99FE2C30.9@sacto.mp.usbr.gov>
Trouble is, the Internet is a free association of >30,000 autonomous nets,
each of which (in principle) could have its own policy on the carriage of
commercial traffic.
There's a notion, left over from the Very Early Days of the ARPANET, that
use for commercial purposes is prohibited, that advertising is prohibited,
and that even job announcements (except for academic positions (!!)) are
prohibited.
In general - i.e., if you took a vote among the 30,000+ nets today - those
prohibitions are no longer true.
The NSFNET Backbone Service restricts traffic - commercial or otherwise -
to that which is in support of research and education; it is similar in
that regard to a number of chunks of the Internet that were set up by
various (state, federal, and foreign) governmental authorities to further
the academic research and educational process. But as has been noted
earlier, nets which have joined the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX)
generally have no restrictions on commercial traffic, and - judging by the
relative rate of registrations in the .COM domain - commercial use of the
Internet is the fastest growing usage segment.
Non-commercial use is clearly insufficient to support the number and
variety of Internet access suppliers, and could scarcely justify the
entrance of Sprint, MCI, AT&T, and recently Ameritech into the market.
Indeed, direct federal support of the U.S. part of the Internet is
currently estimated at about 4%; the other 96% is private, and largely
commercial. I'm composing this message at NetWorld+Interop, an organic
testimony to the health of commercial Internet interests.
-s
