[2089] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
It is time for NSF to change its funding approach
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (HORN%athena@leia.polaroid.com)
Fri Jan 24 21:05:15 1992
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 1992 21:04 EST
From: HORN%athena@leia.polaroid.com
To: com-priv@psi.com
Now that most of the CO+RE furor seems to have ebbed, my reaction is
that the negative reactions are because of the appearance that the
government picked a ``winner'' and not because of impropriety. Many
of the suggestions and reactions favor policies that are in the grey
area for Federal funding policies. Most of the popular Internet
activities fall into a grey area open to interpretation and almost no
one worries about the appearance of impropriety.
The reaction carries more the flavor of being upset that someone else
is making a decision that the discussion participants would prefer to
make individually, separately, and for themselves. They don't want
NSF picking their vendor.
It appears to me that the commercial offerings for IP network services
are now varied enough and strong enough that NSF should change its
funding methods ASAP. It can now switch to a model similar to that used
for computers, where the researcher is granted real money. NSF allows
researchers to choose the vendor, and only in special situations is
the vendor or computer selected or provided by NSF.
This allows vendors to treat the whole world as ``commercial'' in the
Internet sense. It is vendors who choose to give university discounts,
not some NSF operation.
It also avoids the risk that NSF becomes a regulatory agency. This is
not in anyone's interest. Regulation (which includes cost allocation
as just one component) is an extremely difficult task to do right.
The various comments on this list about how to handle these tasks are
naively oversimplified. They are on a par with describing TCP/IP and
all the rest of Internet engineering as: Send the data in packets
and resend the ones that arrive corrupted. True, but there are lots
of difficult details left out.
Rob Horn horn%hydra@polaroid.com
