[323] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
CERFnet, PSI and Uunet Interconnection?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bob Sutterfield)
Fri Mar 8 09:39:02 1991
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 91 09:20:18 -0500
From: Bob Sutterfield <bob@morningstar.com>
To: steve@cise.nsf.gov, tmn!cook@uunet.uu.net
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Stephen Wolff's message of Fri, 08 Mar 91 08:07:36 EST <9103081307.AA13326@cise.cise.nsf.gov>
From: Gordon Cook, Office of Technology Assessment <tmn!cook@uunet.uu.net>
Date: Thu Mar 7 21:50:23 1991
...at the OTA meeting Bill Schrader made a pre announcement of some
interest: namely that PSI, Uunet, and Cerfnet had decided to
interconnect with each other. (This was Feb 14th)... What do the
folks on this list read as the political significance of this move?
Date: Fri, 08 Mar 91 08:07:36 EST
From: Stephen Wolff <steve@cise.nsf.gov>
...one of the greatest dangers of a privatized, multi-backbone NREN
is that the major backbone vendors will refuse to carry the traffic
of each others' clients (or will charge extortionate rates for
doing so), thus fragmenting the national user community and
depriving it of those very benefits the network is intended to
promote.
Before the standardization of the railroads' hardware, there was a
complex and expensive collection of trans-shipment points where cargo
was unloaded from one line's cars and reloaded onto another line's
cars. Each line was essentially a monopoly in its geographic area,
since its rails were laid at its unique gauge and the cost of entry
into a particular line's market was prohibitively high, often
requiring extensive retooling of the manufacturer's production
facilities. This is where internetworking has been until this
Valentine's Day announcement at the OTA meeting.
When economic and political factors forced the lines to standardize on
a particular track gauge, government tariffs, regulations, and
subsidies provided an orderly environment for the construction of the
remarkable rail infrastructure that enabled this country's growth
through the industrial age. This is the next phase of growth for the
internetworking industry, and the phase for which we must be planning.
It also seems to be the most popular theme of discussion in this
forum: What sort of governmental environment will be established to
enable and encourage private expansion of the information
infrastructure to support the country's growth?
Now, with the US in the post-industrial age, the rail lines have lost
much of their economic influence. They have become a niche market in
the overall transportation system, just as the canal boats and
ox-drawn wagons before them. How long until information networking
reaches that phase of its life? And what will come along to render it
mostly obsolete?
Ohio's canal boatmen of the 1830s thought they had created the
ultimate system of commerce, and had no way of imagining the
railroads, nor of estimating their influence. The railroad industry
of the 1890s had no way to imagine the airlines, and no way to
estimate their influence. We think that information internetworking,
if taken to an extreme (ToasterNet), will be the ultimate. I hesitate
to presume that we've finally arrived at the final answer, though I
can't imagine what commodity might come "beyond information" either.
And remember, it won't be Just Another TCP Port.
