[9590] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Hans-Werner/Conditions Remark
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gordon Cook)
Thu Jan 13 10:46:51 1994
From: cook@path.net (Gordon Cook)
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 1994 15:44:45 GMT
Apparently-To: <com-priv@psi.com>
So do we have the metrics you mention Hans Werner? Not that I can tell.
And Steve's letter mentions requirements on ANS above and beyond those
metrics. Requirements that ANS has apparently never bothered to report
to the national science foundation. They monitor this. One would hope
that they would report the details here. In the absence of such
reporting, can one be blamed for assuming they just don't have them?
The whole deal was crafted so it would LOOK like the public interest was
being protected. Yet when I go looking via FOIA for evidence that ANS
has been living up to the conditions imposed by NSF, no one seems to
have any evidence.
Last week, in a phone conversation with a senior internet figure, I
mentioned that I had heard that Steve intended to award the vBNS and
NAPs to MCI and ANS. The reply: such an outcome would not surprise the
senior internet person.
If this sorry scenario does turn out to be correct, I hope that we will
have a ray of light with Vint Cerf's move to MCI. I would hope that MCI
will be made the senior partner and that Vint will be made the person
responsible for interfacing with the NSF and the Internet community at
large on this new coop agreement. If so I am confident that we will see
an openness and **accountability** that has been absent since ANS appeared
on the scene more than 3 years ago. And as Brock pointed out we should
never again have to have the inspector general at the NSF execute a
cover up for IBM's law firm (Wilmer Cuttler & Pickering) by explaining
that what those good people really meant to file with IRS on ANS's
behalf was a sub cooperative agreement rather than a subcontract...
