[112] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
commercial use of the Internet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bob)
Sun Nov 11 21:49:58 1990
To: com-priv@psi.com
Cc: smart@mel.dit.csiro.au
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 90 13:37:29 +1100
From: Bob <smart@mel.dit.csiro.au>
I have been quietly listening to the debate. I suspect that my wishes for
the outcome of all this are much the same as the other minor and non
participants:
1) I would like to see continued general central support for networking
for a while to get the technology really going before abandonning it to
its fate. It is clear that we have only scratched the surface of
potential applications and that it is a chicken and egg problem: we need
the network to encourage the applications and we need the applications
to justify the network. To break out we urgently need commercial
services on the network. If those services are to be accessable to the
commercial customers on the Internet then they need to be on the commercial
part of the Internet (alternet or psi or whatever).
2) The R&E people should push the commercial use of the Internet in the
right directions.
a) Commercial networks (alternet, PSI, etc) should not be allowed to
connect to the R&E backbone unless they are also connected to each
other.
b) Commercial organizations attached to the R&E part of the Internet
should get a letter saying "if you do not have a connection to the
commercial Internet then please let us know what internal precautions
you are taking to ensure that your staff don't inadvertently use the
R&E backbone for commercial purposes". And set up a one warning then
your off system for future transgressions. In particular the companies
that remain only on the R&E part of the network must not allow
packet level exchanges with commercial concerns on the commercial or
on the R&E parts of the Internet -- in other words the communication
on behalf of a 3rd party rule should be dropped.
At this point we can say that all commercial traffic _could_ go over the
commercial links. The R&E people should then announce "Because the
technology is not able to distinguish and route traffic based on acceptable
use we do not expect anyone to take any further action to ensure that
commercial traffic is restricted to commercial parts of the network.
>From now on it's open slather."
Well of course some Universities have uucp links to commercial people. I
don't think that anybody should think about that except the Universities
involved. It should be assumed that all traffic that a University or
Research center creates or accepts must be supporting the research or
education there: otherwise why do they do it? So there is no point looking
deeper into such murky water.
Bob Smart <smart@mel.dit.csiro.au>
