[333] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
re: A NIC for the Internet?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Craig Partridge)
Mon Mar 11 03:33:35 1991
From: Daniel P Dern <ddern@world.std.com>
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
From: Craig Partridge <craig@sics.se>
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 91 09:18:23 +0100
Hi Dan:
Let me see if I can try to answer some of your questions (or, at least,
explain the current state of the world).
> 1) The Internet and the NSFnet seem to be strongly equated, NIC-wise.
> Are we then talking about an "NSFnet NIC," serving NSF clients and
> perhaps connected nets, e.g., regionals and commercials? What about
> all them internationals and so on? The DDN NIC seems to be providing
> a fair amount of general help, understandably and to what I perceive
> as good effect. But an "Internet NIC" (InterNIC?) raises the same
> roster of questions as NREN, NSFnet and privitization does for
> transport, e.g., access, authorization, policy, commercial traffic/
> content... Do regionals currently send any money to the NIC(s)? I'm
> not saying they should, or shouldn't?
No regionals do not current send money to NICs.
One idea I've heard talked about periodically (note that's *not* a euphemism
for "heard from NSF" but rather just that various folks have chatted about
these ideas over a beer now and then) is that if the backbone became
privitized, and regionals had to pay for their backbone connectivity,
part of that connection fee also should be allocated to a national-NIC.
Most of us see NICs organized in some sort of hierarchy such as: campus
NICS/help centers to do basic user training; regional NICs to provide
regional-oriented information to campus help centers; an national NICs
to deal with country wide issues; and an international NIC to deal with
global concerns like IP address allocation, root domain service, primary
RFC repositories.
You can sort of see a skeleton of this structure already -- campus help
centers and regional NICs exist. But then it gets really murky:
we have NICs for special disciplines (e.g. OCEANIC) and for individual
sponors' networks (DDN NIC, NNSC, the NSI NIC). And there are some
country-wide NICs outside the US, but many (most?) countries don't
have them.
There have been periodic efforts by the major NICs to try to find a
way to work together to provide a sort of distributed national NIC
for the US. In general, these efforts done poorly for a variety of
reasons.
> 2) The NNSC (NSFnet Network Service Center) .... does winning a
> NIC contract include this? If so, why isn't the NNSC part of the
> current NIC?
Short discussion of the NNSC. The NNSC was set up by NSF to help
promote the use of the NSFNET and to promote the development of a
user support system. Note that mission is quite different from the
DDN NIC's role as front-line support for DoD network users. So while
the DDN NIC is handling direct phone calls from users, the NNSC (while
it takes user phone calls all the time) tends toward activities that
encourage development of user support services at local and regional
levels such as holding seminars (often with MERIT) on how to set up
a campus NIC & NOC and and activities which help those NICs do their job
better such as publishing the Internet Managers' Phone Book,
publishing a newsletter, and editing the Internet Resource Guide.
[This difference in missing is reflected in staff sizes: the NNSC has
4 staff members; the NIC about ten times that].
> This does raise an interesting question, namely, where _does_ one
> go to get information re the Internet? The answer(s) I got some
> months ago boiled down to: "Call the NIC|NNSC|Merit|FARRnet|other
> and you'll probably find, or be referred to, the right person
> within two calls."
This is a result of the incomplete attempts to create a distributed
NIC. It was clear no one knew everything, so an informal network
was set up to try to help users track down the right answer. There's
been a continuing sotto voce debate about whether the procedure should
be for each NIC to answer the questions itself (which involves calling
other NICs if necessary to get the answer and then calling the user
back), or just refer the user to the believed to be right place.
Note that passing the user on may cause indefinite telephone "your
it" syndrome, but answering the questions in full every time requires
more staff, which some NICs don't have.
Craig
