[338] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: A few questions re current discussions...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ittai Hershman)
Mon Mar 11 14:22:05 1991
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 91 14:09:13 EST
From: Ittai Hershman <ittai@shemesh.stern.nyu.edu>
To: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 11 Mar 91 13:11:22 -0500
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Perhaps the problem is that we have pretty much saturated (at least
for the moment) that which people are willing to do for free (packrat
source archives, some name services etc.)
I disagree. I suspect there are lots of people working on lots of
useful things which they would happily give away. I think we are
seeing a different aspect of the scalability problem here -- namely
that giving things away on the Internet these days is hard work.
The anonymous FTP model of software distribution has broken down, at
least from an end-users point of view. It seems to me the
commercial/privatized Internet service providers have an opportunity
to gain competitive advantages by developing and deploying end-user
oriented tools to leverage the vast resources available on the
Internet. Making it easier to get, will also make it easier (and
cheaper) to give.
In fact, I would argue that these end-user oriented services are the
issues upon which the privatized/commercial Internet providers will
eventually compete for customers.
-Ittai
