[8806] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: VERY serious $ Business now done on Internet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rob Raisch, The Internet Company)
Sun Dec 5 13:54:56 1993
Date: Sun, 5 Dec 1993 10:44:53 -0800 (PST)
From: "Rob Raisch, The Internet Company" <raisch@internet.com>
To: David Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>
Cc: Commercialization is not a dirty word <com-priv@psi.com>
Dave, I read your recent comments with great interest. You make a number
of valid points about the community on the net. While I can understand
your position that the Internet mostly abhors commerce, that is not
entirely my experience. There is a growing commercial constituency on the
net and if properly presented to the community, issues of improper or
unacceptable use do not seem to be of concern. Let me explain.
We operate two very large and popular commercial services on the Global
Internet, Counterpoint Publishing's Internet Federal Register, Commerce
Business Daily and Code of Federal Regulations, and The Electronic
Newsstand.
Both projects are designed to return substantial value back to the
community of the Global Internet while conducting business. The first
based on an artificial restriction imposed upon it and the second because
its business model was structured so from its creation.
Counterpoint provides various federal databases to their subscribers on a
daily basis. Fees are charged for the majority of the data, but they also
provide those portions of the U.S. Federal Register published daily by the
F.C.C., Patent Office, Commission on Human Rights, National Endowment on
the Arts and Humanities and all Presidential documents, for no charge to
the global community. This was a requirement we placed upon them when we
agreed to develop the conversion, management and server software, and to
manage the actual servers for them.
The Electronic Newsstand (Enews) provides (at the very least) one full
editorial or feature article and complete table of contents from 40+
mainstream consumer and academic magazines for no charge to the Global
Internet. The titles include: The New Yorker, The National Review, The
New Republic, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Out, the magazines from the
Learning Channel and the Discovery Channel, Outside, Discover... and will
soon include over 60 magazines (contracts signed, waiting for data.)
The New Republic provides FULL content from each issue and I believe that
this is completely unprecedented in the world of mainstream publishing.
The Enews was built from an original premise/ideal that services of
commercial value could and in many cases, should be structured to
participate in the online community rather than to simply take from it.
The business model is extremely simple. The publisher pays a small yearly
fee to participate ($1500-$5000 depending on the size of the magazine in
subscribers) and provides a portion of every subscription generated from the
Enews (via email request) back to the project.
While I do not feel that the kickback from subs will be a valuable source
of income (and this is not how the project is sold to its participants), I
believe that the real value to the publisher is the exposure the magazine
receives within the online community. The Enews is currently approaching
30,000 retrievals a day. That, I believe, is valuable exposure.
What concerns me the most is that there seems to be a strong feeling in
the academic community that the commercialization of the network will only
serve to limit access to the network and the services it provides to the
researchers who built its original community.
While this is a real possibility, (and one which I would fight with as
much vigor as I possess), I see the very real possibility that it will
provide unique opportunities to the academic community to provide services
and expertise sorely needed to make sense of the chaos.
"Info-glut" is a real problem in the modern world. We are inundated with
more information than we can adequately manage. This suggests that there
is a need for the participation of experts (in any field) who become much
more than simply scribes or copyists -- they become the lenses of our
information needs.
Until we have automated agents which can manage our personal information
requirements (and I believe these are very far off, indeed), consumers of
information will demand high-content, distilled sources of vertically
integrated information. This is the role which librarians, archivists and
researchers play today and will most assuredly be called upon to fulfill
in the future.
In many ways, the academe operates far from the world of application. It
has been the traditional role of the academic to explore and chart new
geographies but not to colonize them, but without the close collaboration
of the explorer and the settler, new territories will remain unknown by
most and unused by all.
I believe that the Global Information Infrastructure represents an
incredible opportunity for the research, application and consumer
communities to coexist as equal partners in the ongoing discovery of
ourselves and our universe. This is what drives me to make the Global
Internet a tool in the service of us all.
Could you send me a copy of your proposal on Commerce and the III? Thanks.
</rr> -Rob Raisch, The Internet Company
