[1640] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Commercial Confusion
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gordon Cook)
Sun Dec 8 15:12:02 1991
To: com-priv@psi.com
Date: 8 Dec 91 15:09:37 EST (Sun)
From: cook@tmn.com (Gordon Cook)
<<MESSAGE from>> Gordon Cook 08-DEC-91 15:09
cook@tmn
The debate about signing connectivity agreements or having commercial
traffic from ANS customers to the mid-levels blocked confuses me on
several grounds.
Yesterday's traffic stated (or at least certainly implied) that all that
was asked for is a signing of the connectivity agreement and that was at
no cost to the mid-level. Yet ANS' own document states that in a
normative case a FARnet member would not not only the connectivity
agreement *but also* either the Gateway Attachment Agreement or the
Cooperative Agreement or a variant.
From what I can understand of the wording of the document under the
Gateway agreement, the mid-level must pay ANS a fee (presumably annual)
that varies according to the number of commercial sites it attaches. I
had also assumed (evidently incorrectly) that these plans were for
implementation in November of next year when NSF turned the backbone over
to ANS and were now rendered moot by the decision to rebid. ] Under the
cooperative agreement which sounds just a tiny little bit like a merger
agreement, the mid-level lets ANS CO+RE "concentrate" on its commercial
clients. (The implicaion appears to be that they become ANS clients.) As
far as I can tell the mid-level that signs a cooperative agreement does
not have to pay ANS and indeed can benefit from the infrastructure pool.
Have things changed? Can the mid-level really sign only the connectivity
agreement? Do the gateway and cooperative agreements no longer exist?
Next would someone please define what is meant by a commercial connection?
If Dialogue is ANS's first such, how does one categorize the connections
of Union Carbide and Abbot Labs? Is a commercial connection commercial
ONLY when the company has something to SELL to the research members of the
network?
If I were a Fortune 1000 company wanting to talk to R&E institutions and I
saw that with an ANS connection I could only talk to the subset of those
institutions whose mid-levels had signed the appropriate agreements, why
shouldn't I talk to the CIX and sign with them? Except that I'd guess the
CIX is treated now as a midlevel and it too must sign an agreement.
Should it choose not to sign can traffic from its commercial customers
that is research in nature still flow over the NSF backbone to any
mid-level????
It is likely that MOST Fortune 1000 companies priorities are FIRST for
widearea TCP/IP interconnects of their LANs and only secondarily for
talking to the colleges and universities on the NSFnet. Faced with this
jungle of barriers as to what is acceptable and what is not why wouldn't
they opt for MCI's private widearea tcp/ip interconnects having nothing to
do with the internet community? Or for EINet?
The conversation here has been in terms of letting ANS clients reach the
mid-levels. Do you mean to say that if I were a mid-level and connected
such customers as Bell Labs, Seimens, Bristol Meyers-Squib etc etc that
their traffic could flow freely across the backbone because what we are
talking about is only the NSFnet backbone and NOT the ANSnet backbone
where ANS customers by definition must connect?? If so and I were a
mid-level manager would I really care that much about ANS traffic reaching
clients on my net? Would I be able to reach an informed decision by
finding out exactly what ANS customers would be barred from talking to my
sites if I signed nothing?
