[8796] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: VERY serious $ Business now done on Internet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Douglas Barnes)
Sun Dec 5 10:55:21 1993
From: cman@caffeine.io.com (Douglas Barnes)
To: farber@central.cis.upenn.edu (David Farber)
Date: Sun, 5 Dec 1993 09:40:43 -0600 (CST)
Cc: cook@path.net, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <199312051204.HAA15436@linc.cis.upenn.edu> from "David Farber" at Dec 5, 93 07:04:55 am
[re: Cook vs. Farber]
Some samples illustrating what Mr. Farber is talking about (excerpts from
the previous week of my life):
1) In some of our efforts to conduct commercial activity on our system
(which can be connected to over the net) we have been flamed mightily
by a large number of spoiled children who believe all resources placed
on the net should be free.
2) Yesterday I spoke with a dear friend now in medical school, and
mentioned this list. "Commercialize and Privatize? Oh, I hope they
don't, that sounds terrible." Certainly not an idiot, she was
nevertheless of the opinion that this meant she wouldn't get a
"free" account from UT Galveston anymore.
3) On another mailing list I read, which is being severely disrupted by
a mentally ill gentleman in Colorado, requests to delete him were met
by numerous insistent protests of, "You can't censor him, because this
list is on the net, which is publicly funded."
Of course, these people are wrong; they would be wrong even if the
government _did_ still run the show. The fact that many people are so
profoundly in error suggests an even larger number of people (who
I have also dealt with) who simply have a vague nagging feeling that
commercial use is _bad_. A great many users have gone from subsidized
access at universities to subsidized access at their companies, and
have never had to pay a dime for anything net-related.
I think Mr. Cook and Mr. Farber are talking past each other; Mr. Cook's
examples of commercial use are fairly non-intrusive, and where visible
masquerade as a 'free service' (e.g., tech support over the net.)
Mr. Farber is seeing a culture that is violently opposed to overt
commercial activity on the services front (e.g., pay-per-ftp). It's
a dying culture, centered in academia, but it is still a powerful
presence on the net.
Also, despite the fact that there are some quite serious business
activites going on, as Mr. Cook points out, Mr. Farber seems to be
accurately describing a great deal (if not still the majority) of net
traffic and the communities around it, which are devoted to moving GIFs
from hither to yon, telnetting to MUDs, playing netrek, doing irc, or
just generally being silly in the medium of your choice.
--
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Douglas Barnes cman@illuminati.io.com / \
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