[390] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
ANS & commercial traffic
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dick Karpinski)
Sat Mar 16 22:04:23 1991
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 91 18:52:15 PST
From: dick@ccnext.ucsf.edu (Dick Karpinski)
To: com-priv@uu.psi.com
> ...current charter is _solely_ wholesale connect, e.g., from
> regional/midlevels to their backbone, but _NO_ retail/site
> direct connection. ...
>
> Also -- again, my understanding -- is that ANS has been set up
> explicitly as a non-profit, carrying ONLY R&D&E traffic. But
> that the corporate partners _do_ retain the option of also setting
> up a for-profit, corporate, carry-anything backbone (presumably
> using their giganickel. ...
>
> Daniel Dern
> ddern@world.std.com
Damn. The ploy of separating commercial from academic and research
networks only on the customer contact front office organization is a
great idea. It's not what ANS is doing, but it is still a great idea.
It could work like having two newspapers using the same presses. The
commercial clients could be required to respect bans on unsolicited
advertising while paying higher rates to exploit the robust infra-
structure built by NSF and other non-profits. This could provide
continuing financing to subsidize academic and research networking
while saving government funds for projects less interesting to the
commercial sector.
We need access to outside companies just to run our own operations.
This need for interconnection is the appropriate target of the
organizations supporting the Internet. I though it delightful that
such organizations as IBM and MCI were conspiring toward such a clever
and worthwhile plan. Too bad it's not what they were doing.
Dick Karpinski
