[105] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
NSF censoring sites around the Internet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Sun Nov 11 19:52:43 1990
Date: Sun, 11 Nov 90 19:40:05 -0500
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: farber@central.cis.upenn.edu
Cc: lear@turbo.bio.net, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: David J. Farber's message of Sun, 11 Nov 90 18:40:31 EST <9011112340.AA05778@pcpond.cis.upenn.edu>
I agree with you 100% that networking costs should be borne by
overhead, anything else is madness. In defense of Eliot I assume he
wasn't thinking of the overhead vs. direct charge cost specifically.
The biggest problem (from my experience) is, how does one ensure that
overhead monies promised for networking actually get used for that at
some reasonable level.
My experience is that, other than the larger research universities,
many institutions see networking as, oh, "a necessary frill".
Something which is generally considered important, but often excused
as too expensive "this year". Particularly once barely adequate
resources are put into place (e.g. the college with the bitnet-only
connection trying to convince the administration to get a full NSFnet
hook-up, or to upgrade bandwidth.)
I'd like to see the faculty somehow protected from that sort of
potential warfare right from the beginning, it's a huge waste of
energy. It's often hard to convince an administration that newer
technologies are necessary, particularly when they're not "to have and
to hold" items; not boxes that look good in the machine rooms or
offices (remember trying to convince administrations it was important
to have a service contract out of overhead on your workstation a few
years ago?)
It would be nice if there were some way to encumber that overhead for
fairly specific levels of networking services. Not sure how the
mechanics of that could work, probably just by fiat.
-Barry Shein
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