[2083] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Economics
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Mandelbaum)
Fri Jan 24 08:26:29 1992
To: Ken Laws <LAWS@ai.sri.com>
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 23 Jan 92 22:32:29 -0800.
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 92 08:25:01 -0500
From: Richard Mandelbaum <rma@tsar.cc.rochester.edu>
I don't know who is selling what, but for the NYSERNet community we
have an E-mail service called NYSERLink which we sell for about $200/year.
I know PSI has E-mail type services on both a single and institutional
basis for similar amounts.
I don't know what other commercial and regional providers charge
but it certainly is possible to get unlimited dial-up Internet mail
access for less than 10% of the quoted $250/month.
____________________
> From Richard Mandelbaum:
> No one charges $250/month for E-mail unless you
> are doing a hell of a lot of E-mail and storing it on site and perha
ps
> "forgot" about the other 500 megs of storage you have on the machine
etc.
Oh yes they do. Proposals to NSF (at least in the IRIS division) ofte
n
have a line item for several thousand dollars per login. The professo
r
requests one for himself and one for each graduate student, of course,
and sometimes one for a visiting scientist. And sometimes one more,
just for the heck of it.
So, what's NSF to do? They know it's all funny money, but the compute
r
centers insist that these charges aren't negotiable. As an NSF progra
m
director, I always accepted that the professor had to have email, so I
always recommended that at least one login be allowed -- although I
grumbled a great deal about how that should be part of overhead. I wo
uld
usually allow the student logins as well -- but sometimes that charge
and others were just too much, and I would recommend eliminating one
student entirely. (As in, "I recommend that you take it or leave it."
)
As with most msc. line items, it always looked to the school like addi
ng
them to the proposal was a no-lose proposition. Awards tend to have a
constant bottom line, though, and any money that went to pseudo-overhe
ad
came out of research funds. I've heard professors complain that they
have to fight as hard to get their research money from the deans as
they had to to get it from NSF.
-- Ken
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