[603] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: At What Price Will TCP/IP Connections Gain Wide Market Appeal?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Edward Vielmetti)
Tue Apr 16 16:02:42 1991
To: gnu@toad.com (John Gilmore)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 15 Apr 91 23:50:06 -0700.
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 91 16:01:11 EDT
From: Edward Vielmetti <emv@ox.com>
> The charges for connecting to a network access provider such as
> Alternet or PSInet can be split down N ways by leasing your own lines
> among friends, in the grand uucp tradition. Alternet has no third
> party traffic prohibition (Thanks Rick!) and for the other companies
> the extra cost is less than everybody hooking up separately.
It's not entirely clear to me that this is a matter of stated policy
by these service providers; rather, it seems as though third party
traffic is only acceptable under certain (unspecified) conditions, which
are a matter of negotiation and perhaps prior approval on a case by case
basis. From all that I can gather, it's emphatically not in the grand
uucp tradition of just throwing a line wherever you want and connecting
to whoever you want.
This might be phrased in terms of "not endangering our NSFnet connection",
or "recouping the cost of supporting your back door connections who will
call us for help", or "providing a retail (not a wholesale) connection".
Network service providers might charge you more for the right to tag people
along behind you, either on a per each basis or a higher flat rate tarriff.
These costs might be different depending on whether you are a loose
affiliation of users banding together to save money or a for-profit,
incorporated entity looking to sell services.
There are a number of reasonable things to do, and depending on how
your costs are structured you might answer differently. Sensible
commercial network service providers will not want to subsidize creation
of competitors, though they might be willing to assist others to enter
markets which they have no current toehold in.
--Ed
