[1833] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (sean mclinden)
Thu Jan 2 17:00:33 1992
Date: Thu, 2 Jan 92 16:46:21 -0500
From: sean@dsl.pitt.edu (sean mclinden)
To: com-priv@psi.com
Subject: Re: Is the personal electronic frontier related to Internet?
Brad's points in response to mine, re: personal versus institutional use
are on the mark, especial as they deal with the history of telephony
(a history which we would do well not to forget!).
But I would like to amplify one point about personal power and networking:
A few weeks ago, I phoned a vendor of audio systems regarding an endorsement
that I had read in the USENET group rec.video. When the representative asked
how I got their number, I told hime about USENET and asked him if he had
ever heard of it. He remarked that he had and that when he had his first
dealings with a client who was a USENET news user, he was somewhat disturbed
by the implications of a {nation,world}wide network of people some of whom
may have axes to grind.
But then he continued with a few other comments. He remarked that once he
started doing business with USENET people and realized the value of an
endorsement, his motivation to improve his customer service budget was
dramatically increased. In a little more than one year his business more
than tripled and while 90% of his business in 1990 was regional, almost
75% of his business in 1991 was national. He now includes USENET and
Internet on his customer inquiry forms ("Where did you learn about us?").
In summary, he felt that the effect of the newsgroup was overall positive
on his business and where it had the potential to be negative, he was
motivated to improve.
As Brad mentioned, his company (and a number of others) rely on some form
of networking for their business be it delivery of software upgrades or
customer support. That in and of itself is not remarkable.
What is remarkable is that an informal network of mixed technologies can
have a measurable effect on a non-IS vendor in such a short span of time.
This is hardly an isolated example and I'm sure that many of us know
of many others.
But to my point. The Internet (and various bridged nets), is the only
interactive media besides shortwave radio whose actual costs are not reflected
directly in costs to users. In essence, this means that users have
access to an unlimited source of (in many cases) uncensored, unregulated infor-
mation for what amounts to a fixed rate. I say "what amounts to" because, in
fact, long distanc and backbone connect charges are often footed by larger
organizations or hidden in budgets, somewhere, where they are not immediately
obvious.
This represents tremdous personal power for the individual, above what any
other media has the potential to deliver. It also (if one has tendencies toward
paranoia), is a tremendous force by which users' access to information could be
restricted or censored (economic censorship is what usage-based rate structures
are all about).
I don't believe that adequate investigation has been done into the true value
of this technology as a personal and self-educational tool. Because of this I
am concerned that potentially destructive decisions will be made by Government,
regulators, public utility commissions, and businesses who are too keenly fo-
cussed on the inter-institutional use of this technology. To a certain degree
one can already observe this as it has been reflected in the wide variety of
ISDN costs and tariffs, nationwide, and in deployment of the NSFNet and re-
gional hubs (compare and contrast the cost of connection to PREPNet in
Pennsylvania and JVNCNet in New Jersey to get an idea of variations in policy).
And if I were to go one step further, I could even imagine a very malevolent
usage of this technology with policy-based routing giving way to content-based
routing, and so on.
Organizations like CIX are, perhaps, a step in the right direction as they
(supposedly) articulate what is the members' corporate agenda. But even so,
CIX is, first and foremost, a business advocacy group and though many
of the representatives of CIX members (as well as others) have publically
addressed the need for a focus on individual rights to access, this is
a far cry short from a statement of policy which guarantees those rights.
There are many issues to tackle and this is only one of them. I would
assert, however, that we cannot lose site of that future lest we build a
vehicle which does not allow us to reach it.
Sean McLinden
