[326] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: A few questions re current discussions...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jack Haverty)
Fri Mar 8 13:14:47 1991
From: Jack Haverty <jhaverty@us.oracle.com>
To: Arun Welch <welch@cis.ohio-state.edu>
Cc: emv@ox.com, jhaverty@us.oracle.com, ddern@world.std.com, com-priv@psi.com,
In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 07 Mar 91 09:42:05 -0500.
Date: Fri, 08 Mar 91 09:50:21 PST
When I described the "intelligent mail agent", I didn't mean to imply that it
was an unsolved problem. The Information Lens work (assuming it is the project
I remember reading about) sounds like good stuff, and there's probably lots of
others.
What I was trying to ask/suggest is how to get these kinds of services to BE
AVAILABLE AS AN INTERNET SERVICE! The Internet, and the Arpanet before it, have
basically offered the same set of services for 20 years - remote login, file
transfer, and electronic-mail/news/bboard. I remember a few other services
that popped up and then seemed to die out for whatever reason - e.g., the
"DataComputer" or the "MOSIS" services. Things like DNS are not new services,
just new mechanisms - e.g., DNS is just a newer way to do name/address mappings,
and it's not really an end-user service, just a part of the support structure
for "the big three".
So I guess the question I was really trying to ask was how does a new service,
whatever it is, get introduced into "The Internet". Who does it? If the
Internet becomes more "privatized", how does it become more entrepreneurial as
well? CompuServe, Dialog, Prodigy, and others have figured this out - should
The Internet evolve similarly? Should there be new applications/services?
Should government somehow "seed" new services? There are technical issues here
to be sure, but I suspect the biggest obstacles are organizational, political,
and managerial.
Jack
