[1820] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Is the personal electronic frontier related to Internet?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (sean mclinden)
Wed Jan 1 15:27:13 1992
Date: Wed, 1 Jan 92 15:14:16 -0500
From: sean@dsl.pitt.edu (sean mclinden)
To: daveh@csn.org, kwe2@BBN.COM
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Kent W. England <kwe2@BBN.COM> writes:
> 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 strongly disagree. I find the term "institutional networking" misleading
in that it's use causes us to think in terms of metaphors which are not
consistent with our future interest. If Wittgenstein is correct about the
role of thought and language it is time we stopped thinking about networks
as a tool of institutions and started to think of it as a tool of the
individual.
In reality (and with a few exceptions such as AlterNET, PSI, and others)
institutions don't want networking and never did. I was an active participant
in the University of Pittsburgh's connection to both ARPANET and the
NSFNet regional PREPNet and I can tell you that "The University of Pittsburgh"
as institutional entity had no interest in the Internet and no knowledge
of it, per se. The motivation behind the institutional involvement (and
the University of Pittsburgh was a charter member of PREP), was the vision
of a few individuals who saw the potential for such a technology. In turn,
these individuals, for the most part, did not view the technology as tool
to be used by institution. Rather they hoped to use it, themselves, for
their own work. Most of the time we fought the institution every step of
the way and my discussions with other individuals in both academia and
corporate life have convinced me that their experiences are nearly the
same.
Many of these "institutions" continue to support users no longer affiliated
with the institution. Both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon
have been known to extend account privileges to graduated students and others
in order that they can maintain Internet connectivity. (In fact, it is not so
much the institution that extends this courtesy as it is the systems main-
tainers at those institutions). They do this because the rate structures and
costs preclude individuals gaining any kind of serious connectivity using
available commercial services.
The problem with this, from a policy point of view, is that it hides what
are the real costs and who are the real users from those people who shape
the policy that affects these users.
The significance of EFF's posture is that it recognizes what we all should:
that this technology should be viewed as personal communications tool, not
a coporate or institutional tool. One only has to look at the history of
the telephone industry to see that this is true and to recognize the imp-
lication of failing to address the needs of the individual users.
The difficulty with what is currently happening with NSF, ANS, and the
migration of the Internet from a research to a production technology is
that it fails to address the needs of the people who currently use the
net. For most of these people, their institutional affiliation is but a
means to an end and yet few of them understand the implications of
the policy decisions and contracts that have progressed behind the scenes.
I do not have enough evidence to suggest, as some, that some of these
dealings have been under the table. But I WOULD say that there has been
insufficient education of the users as to the implications of tariffs,
public policy, the anti-trust suit and MFJ, the structure of ANS,
the growth of Alternet, PSI, and others, and the interests of NSF, for
personal access to this information networking technology.
To my mind, this is the biggest failing of the Federal Government. As
the representative of the people the Government has the responsibility
to promote education of the citizenry. The policy decisions, the
regulations, the contracts that have been made and will be made in the
next few years will dramatically shape the access of individuals to
technology which will be educational, liberating, and ultimately increase
their ability to be involved in and control the events that shape their
lives.
The time has come to emphasize individual NOT institutional needs. This
is, I fear, what may be the problem with more recent policies and
practices regarding the migration of the Internet to a shared technology.
I disagree with Kent. This is, utlimately, ALL about individuals and
only individuals. That is what we are a nation of; not of institutions.
Sean McLinden
Decision Systems Laboratory
University of Pittsburgh
