[8302] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
A reply to Steve Wolff re innuendo and policy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gordon Cook)
Sat Nov 13 01:38:11 1993
From: cook@path.net (Gordon Cook)
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 1993 06:37:31 GMT
To: com-priv@psi.com
Opinion? Sure. Innuendo? Naw. Innuendo - in my book - was the comment of
whomever saw me coming out of the Inspector General Office at NSF at the end of
January of this year and wrote an attack on my analysis of the lack of
documentation of network privatization that I published last april 12. (I did
see an high-level NSF official as I left the IG Suite. Wasn't you Steve.) This
person or at least some individual hiding behind anonymity given him by the
prominent owner of an internet mail list wrote a mish mash of assertions mixing
things that I had said with things that Brock Meeks had said. And then
concluded: "and besides Gordon Cook was recently seen coming out of the IG
suite at the NSF. Stinks to high heaven and the world ought to know!" **That**
is innuendo - Steve.
Evidently my characterization of the legislated position of the NSF was accurate
since you didn't try to take that apart.
So lets examine the situation. We have a situation where because the NSF
mission is supporting science research, the congress appears to say that it
should do cooperative agreements in spending its money because this is leading
edge science and we really don't know how things will turn out and we may need
to change directions in the middle? Now I'll grant you that in many instances
this is probably reasonable.
But was it reasonable with the reengineering of the MERIT agreement on Sept 10
1990? Can you look at the record and say that the more than one million dollars
per month you are spending on a so called t-3 backbone is a shinning success??
Sure of course *YOU* can because being responsible for carrying out these
developments, it would only be reasonable for you to defend your own action.
However, there are others who know the same set of facts and would disagree.
This technology is now commercial. Congratualations, you have been successful.
Now as Ed Krol indeed writes in Network World this week, you (the gov't) should
declare victory and get out of the way.
Instead you are ready to take commercial technology and go out to bid with so
called cost sharing on another cooperative agreement that will allow recipients
to use taxpayer money without the performance metrics provided in most
government contracting. What you appear to be doing is giving out money for
folk to experiment with, when this is NO longer experimental technology. The
rational apparently is that the NSF is required to do *only* cooperative
agreements. Therefore those of us who would ask that you do *contracts* are
asking for something impossible.
I merely suggested that this perhaps was a unwise situation and that the
congress ought to change it. But to change, someone has to tell the congress
that it is unwise. WHO? Generally staffers. But the staffers who are are
there generally represent interest groups, or are at least sympathetic to them.
(Does anyone doubt that the research community is not lobbying the likes of
Wilson and Nelson? - who afterall are from their disciplines. If they were
western cattlemen, would they have the same recommendations? Would the reseach
community pay attention to them?)
What are the statistics on NSF Grants? How much of your 3 billion a year goes
to colleges and universities? How much goes to the top 75 schools in the
country? That's your constituency.... right or wrong.... that's a fact. Your
constituency does its best to have representatives fill the key staff positions
on the science committees. Wilson and Nelson are two such folk with whom I am
personally acquainted. A cooperative agreement is likely to go to a university
is it not? A contract is likely to go to a corporation. Is that not also true?
Are we likely to see these staffers trying to convince congress that the system
of grants and cooperative agreements be changed? No. Why? Because it would
hurt their consituency.... that's what I am saying - nothing more nothing less.
Is such a position immoral or illegal? No. Is it biased? Probably. Is it
therefore bad policy? I think so.
PS. I know very well that mike nelson is with jack gibbons at ostp. I knew
Mike in his capacity on the senate commerce committee. I don't know who his
replacement is. But I do know that he shares the mind set that I am critcizing
here. Why? one indication - after I had turned in my keys at OTA on feb 28,
1992, I went to see Mike and told him that I had serious concerns about the
direction of IBM and ANS and pointed out in particular that the backbone had
serious problems. He was offended and said he didn't think it fair for me to be
critical of IBM when that company's cost sharing had saved the US taxpayer 10s
of millions of dollars on the NSFnet. I didn't have a good answer for him then.
But as you know I went looking for the cost sharing and found virtually
NONE....unless you are to count the money spent by IBM to develop routers that
they had to develop anyway for reasons other than the MERIT CA - routers that
have been poor performers, and under a **contract** could presumably have been
replaced by boxes that *do* perform.
