[1770] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Fair competition
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex McKenzie)
Thu Dec 19 08:09:04 1991
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 91 8:08:01 EST
From: Alex McKenzie <mckenzie@BBN.COM>
To: com-priv@psi.com
DISCLAIMER: I am not a supporter of ANS.
Folks,
There is a lot of comment these days about fair competition for the
NREN. I think it is coming several years too late.
The NSFNET was constructed under a "cooperative agreement", not a
contract. A cooperative agreement means that an important component of
the selection process is how much money is contributed by each bidder.
Naturally this gives an advantage to a bidder with deep pockets who is
willing to invest early in the hopes of cashing in later. The company I
work for submitted a bid for NSFNET which would have cost about $20M to
deliver and had a price tag of about $20M. Merit/IBM/MCI submitted a
bid for NSFNET which appeared to cost about $40M to deliver with a price
tag under $20M. Is there a single reader of this list who didn't think
Merit/IBM/MCI hoped to use this investment to capture a dominant
position and cash in later? Obviously I would have liked to see the
competition for NSFNET based solely on technical merit, not amount of
contribution, but that's not the way the game was played and the
community accepted the cooperative agreement approach. I think that by
accepting a non-level playing field then, the community gave up its
right to bitch about it now.
Alex McKenzie
