[2556] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: access to world.std.com from the Univ of Michigan
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Donelan)
Mon Mar 16 13:16:38 1992
Date: Mon, 16 Mar 1992 12:13:13 -0600 (CST)
From: SEAN@SDG.DRA.COM (Sean Donelan)
To: com-priv@psi.com, bob@MorningStar.Com
X-Vmsmail-To: SMTP%"com-priv@psi.com",SMTP%"bob@MorningStar.Com"
>Some connectivity models discriminate based on the site, not on the
>site's traffic. As I understand that world-view, if a site is
>considered commercial, all its traffic is also therefore considered
>commercial. This renders your age-old question rather moot, since
>either the traffic is pre-declared to be acceptable for passage over a
>given link, or it doesn't flow because its routing is disabled. The
>responsibility lies with each site, not with a given user who's
>generating traffic, and the responsibility is accepted long before the
>traffic begins to flow. If a user can successfully generate traffic,
>then it must be acceptable because it's not administratively blocked.
I think you are confusing the ANS proposal for discriminating traffic
based on IP number with the NSF acceptable use policy. They are not
the same.
Just because traffic isn't administratively blocked doesn't mean it meets
NSF's AUP. A professor at a university using the NSF network for private
consulting work could be a violation of the NSF AUP, even though the
traffic may be between two university sites (of course, only the NSF can
say if this is a valid example of an unacceptable use).
There is a presumption built in that not-for-profit educational institutions
will meet the acceptable use requirements as part of maintaining their IRS
tax-exempt status. I don't know how valid that is, since it is hard from the
network point-of-view to figure out which parts of a university are really
owned subsidiaries, or hired by outside companies. From an accounting
point-of-view (which is what the IRS looks at) you can allocated 80% of
the cost of a mainframe to the not-for-profit side of the university, and
the other 20% to taxable use. But the mainframe will only have one IP
number (normally) in the packets flowing around the network for AUP purposes.
Of course the NSF lawyers could decide that Congress really intended to fund
sites (universities, K-12, libraries, etc) rather than network uses (gigabit
research, education, etc), so a rewritten AUP (or connection agreement) could
have a different world-view.
--
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
Domain: sean@sdg.dra.com, Voice: (Work) +1 314-432-1100
