[1379] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Middles and Manners
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mitch Kapor)
Thu Sep 19 10:16:32 1991
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 1991 10:16:09 -0400
To: com-priv@psi.com
From: mkapor@eff.org (Mitch Kapor)
>If, on the other hand, the other providers use ANS for
>interconnectivity between commercial sites, then ANS has a real beef.
>If ANS *is* in the middle, then just who is supposed to pay for their
>services? NSF is willing to pay for R&E usage, but who will cover the
>naughty bits?
ANS' commercial customers, naturally. If sites not on ANS are, in effect,
charged extra for reaching ANS customers, it amounts to a subsidy for
either ANS or its customers. There's no reason to do this.
The CIX provides interconnectivity between commercial sites. Who pays for
its services? The constituent networks and their customers. In other
words, everyone has to pull their own weight. This ought to be the model
everyone uses.
I'm just waiting for someone to make the point that ANS is spending a lot
to develop the T-3 network. Let us assume for the sake of argument this
gives them a higher cost structure other internetworking carriers. Someone
might argue that it is these additional costs which those other carriers
like PSI and Alternet (and their customers) connecting to ANS (via the
CIX) should be forced to bear. Nonsense! ANS undertook the T-3
voluntarily and with help from the NSF because they believed it was the
right thing to do. Fine. But demanding that others with no ownership or
control stake in the T-3 net be forced to pay extra for this is absolutely
unreasonable. ANS needs to recover the investment from any business it can
attract itself, not from its competition. This is not a level playing
field.
It will probably be further argued by ANS that, in the long run (after the
bugs are worked out, after bandwidth needs grow), the T-3 cloud will
benefit all users of the Internet. Shouldn't sites on other carriers and
the carriers themselves help pay for it? Again, my answer is absolutely
not. If there are incremental benefits for some customers, then ANS will
be able to attract incremental business from them to pay for it (or it was
a bad business decision). It may be that the T-3 cloud is a "public good"
which benefits everyone, but that doesn't imply that everyone should pay
for it, especially when it is controlled by a private entity, which is not
publicly accountable. We shouldn't give private parties governmental
power, which is exactly what we would be doing if we bought the argument
which says, in the long run, we need a T-3, so we should accept it on terms
and conditions set by ANS. Sorry, I don't buy that argument.
There are alternatives as to how the network will grow. Maybe AT&T wants
to build a competing T-3 network. From a user point of view, that might be
good in forcing down prices, even though the prospect must frighten all of
the existing carriers.
Now that we have the CIX, and assuming for the moment, ANS joins it, the
biggest barrier to rapid expansion of the net is the adoption of policies
by the regional networks to accept no restriction commercial traffic. If
they did, there would be a rapid influx of information services and
providers doing business to the net's existing uers.
Mitchell Kapor, Electronic Frontier Foundation
mkapor@eff.org
