[9261] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: an Internet buying coop?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dick St.Peters)
Mon Dec 27 12:52:31 1993
Date: Mon, 27 Dec 93 12:45:05 EST
From: stpeters@spare-parts.crd.ge.com (Dick St.Peters)
To: rothman@netcom.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Reply-To: <stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com>
> From: "David H. Rothman" <rothman@netcom.com>
> Here's a thought for all:
>
> Why can't Netcom, Digex and the rest *work together* to come up with at
> easy, *reliable* offline readers available at no extra cost?
To my mind, this is precisely the wrong place for providers to be
spending their resources. The Internet is more than just email and
newsgroups - CompuServe can offer those. What the Internet offers is
qualitatively different and better: the opportunity to eat IP, to
exchange information in real time, to interact with services, to access
images and sounds and all sorts of other information, to receive what
you ask for, not just what somebody decides to send you, to probe
what's out there, to browse the world from your desk. CompuServe and
its ilk cannot do this.
Thinking of the Internet as meaning email is like thinking of
electricity as meaning flashlight batteries.
The capability to deliver affordable IP bandwidth to the home/office is
going to be here soon - some would argue it's here now, but most of the
world has no idea how to use it. If the providers work together on
anything, I think it should be standards/software/whatever to make IP
plug&play ... to build on the Internet's unique strength instead of
working to mimic CompuServe Information Manager.
--
Dick St.Peters
GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com
