[2802] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Internet Privitization
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (drw@BOURBAKI.MIT.EDU)
Fri Jun 5 00:29:16 1992
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 92 00:27:59 EDT
From: drw@BOURBAKI.MIT.EDU
To: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <199206040222.AA03439@teal.csn.org> "daveh@csn.org"
From: Dave Hughes <daveh@csn.org>
[...] the rotton deal the Reagan Adminstration made in 'privatizng'
Landsat images, which by everyone who fills my ear, has permitted
a company to so stick it you-know-where to scientists, universities,
and others that it has crippled scientific research based on
those satellite images.
Although that touches on a tricky part -- when something is
privatized, how the costs are distributed usually changes. Suppose,
for the sake of argument, that the government simply *gave* the
Landsat ground stations, etc. to company X. Would company X sell the
images for free, even assuming a proper competitive environment? No,
since the ground stations and other operations cost serious money.
What has changed is that the government is no longer subsidizing
production of the images, so the buyers of the images are paying more.
Similarly, in the SEC situation, what is happening is that the costs
of the database is being borne by those who want to use it, not the
taxpayers. For those of us who would like to use the information,
it's a loss. For taxpayers who have no interest in using the
information, it's a gain. Welcome to deficit reduction.
Similarly, privatizing the Internet will inevitably eliminate the
network subsidies, increasing the costs to institutions that have
previously been subsidized. Mechanisms should be planned and put in
place to avoid having this cause a sharp impact, for instance,
reallocation of the network subsidies into more money for the
increased indirect costs (now including network access fees).
Dale
Dale Worley Dept. of Math., MIT drw@math.mit.edu
--
Heard on "The Daily Feed", a syndicated political satire radio program:
Saddam Hussein is not Hitler; if he were, France would have surrendered
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