[1828] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Is the personal electronic frontier related to Internet?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Martin Schoffstall)
Thu Jan 2 00:07:09 1992
In-Reply-To: <9201012014.AA09831@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu>
Date: Wed, 01 Jan 92 23:39:30 -0400
To: "sean mclinden" <sean@dsl.pitt.edu>
Cc: daveh@csn.org, kwe2@BBN.COM, com-priv@psi.com
From: "Martin Schoffstall" <schoff@mail.psi.net>
Reply-To: schoff@psi.com
Sean,
You have very nicely articulated some important issues and I couldn't agree
more.
- Personal access is the key issue for the 90's.
- 99.9% of the "rates" preclude personal participation
- granting individual access as you outlined
hides many critical issues, tactically it
feels good, strategically it is a nightmare.
- concur that "they" fail to address the needs; however, it is worse
than that. Since only a tiny fraction of the X (where X is a country,
state, or recognizable group such as "Public Library Librarians") currently
participate in the Internet it doesn't matter. Because they are even more
clueless on these non-participants, it will actually be a CRIME to spend so many
tax dollars on the "old ways and old boys" - but it will happen.
- the EFF isn't the only one interested in this issue
We (and others) have struggled with this for years, one of our hopefully
innovative development projects (SNMP is so passe these days! ;-) ) I
believe is paying off - PSILink. Borrowing from Apple, we'd like to see
it become "Internetworking for the rest of us".
Conceptually people are interested in services not protocols, but some
protocols can be useful (especially application protocols) so we steal
the useful ones from TCP and OSI wrap them in a hopefully scalable
application gateway technology and through away everything that won't
scale to 100's of millions of users (like TCP and IP themselves).
PSILink gets one to the edge of the Internet (or internetwork) in a
scalable manner the servers then attach the necessary "transport".
We shipped at interop for the PC and have had a 2nd release already that
allows the user to do email/paging/lightweight-anonymous-ftp. with more
to come at the beginning of Feburary. All using boring modems (boardwatch
says there are 10million of them in us homes in 1991).
Less we appear entirely closed....
We've even licensed the complete source to one regional network to do
personal access for the educators (and others) of a State.
I hear rumors of other similiar things being worked in other similiar
small scale skunk works. What will be interest to see if the NSF or
others fund such endeavors for pilots in the regional networks - even to
acquire the technology and operate them for their communities.
Don't hold your breath - it is much easier to throw buckets of money at
old ideas/technology and old boys - then to encourage the innovators.
Marty
PS: sorry if this is too much a commercial.
>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.
