[248] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
NREN - Real vs. Rhetoric
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Schrader)
Thu Feb 28 23:58:52 1991
Date: Fri, 1 Mar 91 01:47:30 -0500
From: wls@psi.com (William Schrader)
To: com-priv@psi.com, nren-discuss@psi.com
Cc: wls@psi.com
I sent the following message to another list discussing
NREN public policy issues. It is appropriate here, since
the central theme is the method to mix federal funds
with the enormous private funds in building the US
information services industry.
Bill
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Dave Hughes implies in his "harsh" indictment of NREN
activists that we:
a) are consumed by high performance issues and challenges,
b) have done little to include what I call "Real-Education" or
even "Rhetorical-Education" in serious formal or informal
NREN planning,
c) prepare to spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of
dollars, for billions of bits per second when most Real-E
people have 0.0 bps now and throughout the first five (?)
years of the NREN,
d) have done nothing (statistically) to give or share our
wonderful resources with our children's Education.
I agree with Dave. We stand guilty as charged.
[If any of you wish to give us long lists of little projects you
have done at the economic margin of 1% or 2% of our budgets,
please spare us. This work is good, but does not address Dave's
point. Also, we need not restate the Rhetorical-E, telling us how
good this is for America and Health and Commerce, which we
hear so often from some quarters rather than real discussion of
real issues by real people doing real work.]
To be fair to ourselves, a focus on Performance has been
our job in the past, and as Dave Farber reminds us, it was
the same network originators which chose the broader road
in the mid-80's.
Lets not kid ourselves, we have not _done_ much other than
talk "K-12", with a few notable exceptions. No, we have an
opportunity here to meet a number of long term goals, for
tens of millions of Americans and we can afford no strategic
mistakes.
The HPC/NREN Bill remains Rhetorically strong, strategically
fragile, and tactically flawed. With a few minor but critical
changes in the Bill's language, we will stimulate our
near-moribund supercomputer industry and extend the network
to nearly all students three years _after_ NSF ends its' subsidy
to "MERIT's" Backbone.
In a separate message later next week, I will explain.
Bill Schrader
