[9349] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Is NSF Obeying the Congressional Mandate to Change AUP?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gordon Cook)
Wed Dec 29 23:33:08 1993
From: cook@path.net (Gordon Cook)
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1993 04:32:10 GMT
To: com-priv@psi.com
Cc: mkapor@kei.com, jberman@eff.org, barlow@eff.org, djw@eff.org, gnu@toad.com,
Thanks for your very interesting reply Steve.
You say: In the new scheme of things, we haven't "updated" the AUP, we've all
but done away with it.
>From the context of your reply you are quite clearly referring to the
solicitation architecture which we now know won't be going into effect before
May 1 1995. Until then it apparently is not only NOT done away with but also
very much in effect.
What about the period of time between the ammendment's passage in (I believe)
September 1992 and May 1 1995?
I attended the hearings of March 1992. I heard the discontent with AUP
expressed by Boucher and his republican counterpart as well as by many of those
who testified. NSF was asked why it couldn't change the AUP? The answer was
that your counsel thought legislation would be necessary. Boucher said fine we
will work on getting legislation into your hands so you can free up the network.
Boucher accomplished that aim within 6 months. When roughly 6 months after that
you had *made no immediate use of the tools* he had given you, Mitch Kapor
reminded him of this on February 2, 1993 and asked the subcommittee to find out
**why** you hadn't moved. The concerns that Mitch expressed in his testimony
and that I quoted last night were clearly ones that apply to the PRESENT
network, not, as you are saying, to the new architecture that we may see
**sometime year after next.**
You have been quite eloquent about where you are going to go by the end of 1995.
(But let me remind you that, if you use the Boucher ammendment to justify giving
the owner of the vBNS the right of resale, then you will have just elevated the
unlevel playing field (that brought on the ammendment) to the realmof the vBNS.)
Please explain why in the more than a year since this relaxation became law you
have done nothing to impliment it in the **current** network. Why for example
you have not used Boucher's language to replace the General Principle statement
of the current AUP? I asked this question last night. You did not answer it.
Now the law apparently has no implementing date, although it certainly seemed to
most observers that there was no reason it couldn't be implemented immediately.
Are you saying that you think it was congressional intent that there be a three
year hiatus?
If some of the staffers on the hill see this maybe they could present their
understanding. In the meantime if you are unwilling to use this language to
update the current AUP - NOW, I would like to call on the Electronic Frontier
Foundation to go to Boucher other people as need be on the Hill and obtain a
declaration of what the Congressional intent for the time of implementation was.
I know bureaucracies work slowly. But since you are in charge of the wannabe
billion bit per second network perhaps it's reasonable to expect a faster than
normal response time??
