[8782] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Imminent Death of the Net As We Know It (was Re: One-way Internet?...)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dick St.Peters)
Sat Dec 4 18:25:57 1993
Date: Sat, 4 Dec 93 18:22:06 EST
From: stpeters@spare-parts.crd.ge.com (Dick St.Peters)
To: sean@dsl.pitt.edu
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Reply-To: <stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com>
> From: sean mclinden <sean@dsl.pitt.edu>
> > Are we in for something like this on the Internet ?
> Not necessarily. The value of the "virtual" community is that many of the
> costs (not necessarily monetary) associated with growth may not need to
> be incurred if your infrastructure is appropriately designed. On the
> other hand, part of your scenario depends on the existence of monopolies
> at one or more points in the system, in particular, in the areas of
> government, taxation, and planning of social services all of which force
> communities to decide between mutually exclusive alternatives. The
> Internet need not be like this and should not be like this.
Sean, I think I should have included more of the original posting of
by Karl to which I was intending to respond ... it would have made
clearer what I meant.
His posting made the point that a lot of the value of the net is various
free services that are now provided by people like him, UUNET, World,
etc. The people who are now making money off the net are also giving
something back, adding to the pool of things that make it valuable.
He had a press release or some such about a new access approach 'Spry'
from Sprint that appears to put people on the net at very low cost
without providing them anything else, something that had the potential
to create legions of new users of existing free services without
contributing anything to the services pool. I think a rough statement
of principle here is that if you create users who use my free services,
you should add value by providing free services that my customers can use.
I was trying to argue, much too obliquely I guess, that if Karl is right
about what he described, this community principle is breaking down.
I wasn't intending to argue anything about monopolies or government
structures, only that given a choice between supporting a business
that is community spirited and one that costs less, eventually people
choose the one that costs less.
--
Dick St.Peters
GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com
