[1809] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Is the personal electronic frontier related to Internet?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kent W. England)
Mon Dec 30 17:48:20 1991
From: "Kent W. England" <kwe2@BBN.COM>
To: daveh@csn.org
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <199112252346.AA17677@teal.csn.org>
Date: Mon, 30 Dec 91 15:02:13 EDT
>
>Benjamin Franklin would have been early on the Internet, and not just to
>discuss electricity.
>
Ben wouldn't have had time for the Internet. He served much of his time
in public office as Ambassador to France, where he would have been
plugged into Minitel, probably looking for a date and talking dirty. :-)
Seriously, I find much of the discussion of public interest and personal
networking to be rather orthogonal to the business that most of us are
in, which is institutional networking. I don't quite see how to fit the
two efforts together.
I don't mean to belittle the discussions about public interest and
citizen rights and awareness and public debate, and I like the EFF idea
of ISDN as a public access technology, but I have a hard time fitting
ISDN into institutional and corporate networking, since there are many
better solutions at present to the situations where ISDN might play a
role. But I use ISDN as an example only.
I don't hear a great hue and cry for citizen access to fractional T-1
service and rightly so, it doesn't seem to fit a perceived need.
Likewise, it would be silly to pursue PBX technology for the masses, but
no one can dispute its value to institutions. On the other hand,
Minitel technology seems appropriate to individual information access
needs, but it isn't Internet. Should we pursue a Nintendo-over-ISDN
national network? Or how about email via ATM (that other kind that
citizens know and love already)? Individuals already have a lot at
stake in each of these technologies.
Does most of NREN and commercial internet service actually further the
interests of individual citizens for the electronic frontier or should
we be pursuing other more appropriate technologies at the same time we
pursue NREN and commercialization for institutions? Are they really
orthogonal or does one come before the other?
Do gigabits lead to personal electronic freedom? Or do gigabits only
lead to institutional solutions, as well they should? No one asks when
particle physics research pays off to the little guy, perhaps that is
true of NREN, et al?
I'm just asking; since I don't see much fit between commercial internet
service as it shapes up today and the personal electronic frontier for
the average citizen. Of course, I am happy to pursue two orthogonal
lines of discussion and I like to hear what Geoff Goodfellow can do in
his car on the way to and fro... I don't see much fit at the moment,
pioneers noted and excepted.
What I do see is a lot of confusing discussion of personal use of
institutional (including sole proprietor) resources and extrapolations
of this ad hoc situation to the public at large. I find that premise
currently unsubstantiated.
In the pursuit of enlightened discussion;
--Kent
