[8448] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: A Trojan Horse? Was: Russian chemists harmed by ANS-CIX dispute?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dick St.Peters)
Fri Nov 19 15:30:54 1993
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 93 15:21:25 EST
From: stpeters@spare-parts.crd.ge.com (Dick St.Peters)
To: schoff@psi.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Reply-To: <stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com>
Marty,
I read your posting as a declaration that you are willing to use your
customers as pawns in your war with ANS, and I am appalled.
The various recent reports of place A not being able to reach place B
have left me with a growing sense of dismay. I have yet to find an
IP address I cannot reach, other than those behind firewalls, and I
have until now assumed that they could all reach each other too.
If ANS, the CIX, or anybody else is willing to poison the pie to
prevent somebody else from enjoying a bigger piece, we might as well
all go home. The people in GE who write off the Internet as something
that will self-destruct within 18 months will be wrong only in giving
it too much time.
For the endeavors in which I'm involved - and there suddenly seems to
be a lot of them, we will require a contract stipulating we can reach
any domestic IP address unless the owner of that address does not want
to be reachable. If nobody can provide that, the endeavors almost
certainly will not happen.
Last night I mentioned GE medical's move to remote service via
Internet. There is a lesson in that:
Management there has been so skeptical of networking it took two years
of my lobbying to get them to let even us connect to them. The main
use of that link was soon their people using our gateway to get out.
Their own first CICNet connection a year ago would never have been
authorized if they couldn't get a low-cost R&E rate based on using it
with research they sponsor at universities. Now they are upgrading it
for commercial use.
CICNet puts them on the ANS side, I think, but they would *create*
hundreds of commercial customers. Will they be able to reach those
customers regardless of service providers ?
BTW, they are now reading com-priv, so you can tell them right here.
Marty, if you were the CIX board member who felt it was good for the
community to route to/from ANS, you were right. Steve Wolff, if you're
reading this, I think it would also be good for the community to
require that the commercial provider of NSFNet be a CIX member. Bill
Washburn, I know nothing of what you'd require of ANS, but putting the
terms up for public scrutiny would go a long ways toward making sure no
axes are being ground in the process.
Peace is good for everyone.
--
Dick St.Peters
GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com
