[1912] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Understanding Combits
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (sean mclinden)
Tue Jan 7 19:10:09 1992
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 92 18:56:13 -0500
From: sean@dsl.pitt.edu (sean mclinden)
To: jgong@us.oracle.com, lars@spectrum.CMC.COM
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
> Hear, hear. Put the money into providing more accessible services and
> information. Then customers will decide whether they're willing to pay
> for it (they will) and how fast/how much they want (pipe size-oriented fee
> schedule).
That works if you know what you want, where it is, and how to get it. But
suppose that we had a highway system in which you paid by the mile and by
the speed at which you travelled, but had no maps and no idea where to go.
How would you decide what was the value (or worth) of any trip?
> It seems to me that much of this discussion has centered around how NSF
> spends its money. From a free market standpoint, the CIX affiliates have
> demonstrated some downward pricing from competition or economies of scale,
> as pointed out by another writer. The EFF and other folk interested in
> enlightening the masses seem to want to see the NSF monies diverted to their
> causes. Can someone describe how they would like to see a grassroots
> effort evolve? $19/mo. for dialing into a CIX affiliate for email and
> USENET (tm) and other future services sounds pretty cheap to me, already.
> I wouldn't advocate government subsidies in order to provide the same
> service for, say half the cost to the general public. This government
> gives out a lot already. I don't want an information welfare system
> put in place. And really, I'm not a high tech elitist. I just think
> there's a limit to how low valuable services should be priced.
What about *essential* services. What is available on the Internet, now, is
not just a business tool, it is an educational tool of tremendous value. It
is all the technical journals, plus Consumer Reports, plus a lot of other
things rolled into one. To talk of it as simply an e-mail/USENET news reader
is, I think to choose a very poor metaphor.
The computer (where, as Sun says "the network *is* the computer), is the
the most valuable educational tool yet produced. It allows you to educate
yourself at whatever pace you can sustain (or, in your world, whatever
pace you can afford). Would you want your children's education to be billed
by the minute (or by the byte) independent of what they actually used?
And what about "dialing in." That may be sufficient for you, but people
(and I mean normal citizens) are putting whole networks in their homes.
Although groups such as the CODA group at CMU are working on disconnected
mode filesystem, a great many Internet applications require connected
mode to maintain reliability. Perhaps, in the future, disconnected
operations supported on switched services will be the way to share a limited
bandwidth, equitably. But that isn't what's running on the campuses of
CMU, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, or scores of other places.
My argument is that the vision is wrong, the metaphor is wrong, and as
a result, we are running the risk of designing an implementation which
addresses the wrong problems at the wrong price. If information equity
is what you call "welfare" perhaps we cannot afford NOT to have it.
Sean McLinden
