[595] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
PSI and Unix Today tough it out
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Gilmore)
Tue Apr 16 07:25:25 1991
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 91 00:15:57 PDT
From: gnu@toad.com (John Gilmore)
To: com-priv@psi.com, sean@utoday.com
There's a great story on page 50 of the 1 April Unix Today newsrag.
Seems they took up PSI on the advertised $75/mo "flat rate" uucp
connectivity for email and news, only to discover after paying for a
year in advance that they couldn't forward third party email NOR could
they pass on the netnews. In fact, the letter from PSI told them that
"no electronic mail whatsoever from another organization should be sent
or received through UUPSI", presumably meaning that they could only
send intracompany mail. On its face, even mail sent from PSI to utoday
should not be sent or received via UUPSI; presumably they'd have to
send it via uunet or some other mail gateway! Since this all flies in
the face of conventional practice and reasonableness, PSI had to point
it out explicitly with this letter -- several months later. They *will*
offer the original service as advertised -- but at $275/mo instead.
Can you say "bait and switch", boys and girls? I can.
They *have* offered to refund the customers' money if they don't like
the new terms, but, as the author says, "I think it stinks". And I'm
pleased that one of the first companies affected by it is a publisher;
though anyone on the net can publicize this kind of bogus vendor
behaviour, it gets even better distribution in a magazine. Finally,
I'm glad that their low attempt to hurt uunet's bread-and-butter
business is revealed as a trick, rather than an honest effort to give
equivalent service for a lower price. (I'd have also been glad if they
could provide the same service as uunet for 1/3rd the cost, but I never
believed they could, knowing something about uunet's costs.)
The article was written by Sean Fulton <sean@utoday.com>.
John Gilmore
