[12835] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: What is required for information access?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matthew Kaufman)
Mon May 30 23:00:24 1994
Date: Mon, 30 May 1994 11:56:22 -0700
From: matthew@echo.com (Matthew Kaufman)
To: com-priv@psi.com, SROTH@ucsvax.ucs.umass.edu
> I work at a fairly wealthy public library in a fairly wealthy university
> town. Our endowment is big and funds about one third of our yearly budget.
> Just under two-thirds comes from property taxes. The rest comes from the
> state. We could not afford to pay, say, a $1000 a month out of our current
> budget. We'd need a subsidy of some sort to get and maintain connectivity.
In my town, a full-time 28.8kbps connection to your library, over Centrex
lines, would cost $102/month (INCLUDING the phone lines) (and that speed
could go to 128kbps for $340/month, INCLUDING the phone lines)
And I can assure you that if subsidies for IP connectivity had to come
out of the budgets of IP providers, that price would go up by a LOT
more than the direct cost of that subsidy, to cover such things as the
increased administrative cost of figuring yet another tax and writing
checks to the subsidy organization, and the cost of sending someone
to Sacramento and Washington to make sure that it didn't go up any more
in the future. Or, the business providing that sort of low-cost connectivity
might just figure that now that there's mandated prices, there's no
reason to try to be in competition with people like the local cable
company, no matter how much less attractive their service might be
to a consumer like you. Even if the mandated price turns out to be
a lot closer to $1000/month than to $102/month.
-matthew kaufman
matthew@scruz.net
