[2467] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Billing philosophy...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen Wolff)
Tue Mar 3 13:31:01 1992
To: Jack Haverty <jhaverty@us.oracle.com>
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Date: Tue, 03 Mar 92 13:27:03 EST
From: Stephen Wolff <steve@cise.cise.nsf.gov>
->The subject of this list is COMmercializing and PRIVatizing internet.
->Commercializing, to me at least, means making the system viable as a commercial
->enterprise, competing successfully in the marketplace...
Since I opened this debate, and first introduced the terms
"commercialization" and"privatization" at the first Harvard workshop in
November of '90, and defined at that time what I meant by them, I claim
authoritative ownership of the definitions. They are:
"Commercialization" : The offering of goods and services for sale, and the
delivery of services for fee, by for-profit organisations over the Internet.
"Privatization" : The acquisition of network services from private providers
by network users in an open market rather than by the Federal (or state or
local) government acquiring the network services on users' behalf.
(Note that this has nothing to do with the source of the
funds (e.g., the research-support agencies for the R&D
community), but only with the path by which they reach the
provider.)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Note that five years ago, "product announcements" on the Internet were OK,
but then (as now) "advertising" was/is prohibited. Then, selling software
over the Internet wasn't done, and no commercial information services were
Internet-accessible. Now we have COSMIC and Mead Data Central (and others),
and the consternation over DIALOG was only that it was, for a brief time, not
UNIVERSALLY accessible! I claim "commercialization" is no longer an issue,
except insofar as it is impacted by "Acceptable USe" doctrines; of course
privatization deflects the impact from the (government) supplier to the
service user - where it naturally resides anyway.
The climate for privatization is improving all the time. There is a
vigorously competitive open market in the provision of IP network services;
emerging telco offerings and recent innovations in modem technology are
making (and will continue to make) real IP networking possible for classes
of users for whom less than a decade ago $120k packet switches made the
Internet inaccessible. Privatization is not however an all-or-nothing
proposition; "bleeding edge" networking will never (almost by definition) be
affordable on the open market, so the Federal government will always fund
centrally that advancing technological frontier.
-s
