ietf-asrg
[Top] [All Lists]

RE: [Asrg] My take on e-postage

2004-04-29 04:15:13
Barry Shein <bzs(_at_)world(_dot_)std(_dot_)com> wrote:

Before 1989 you couldn't buy a connection to the internet unless you
could show some bona-fide usage (defense contracting, and towards the
very end of that era, being a university), and then if you were
approved hook-up was basically free.

Strange. I was using the internet (the network interconnecting arpanet,
nfsnet, janet, and various other xxxnets) about the end of 1985 or beginning
of 1986 wearing neither a defence contractor nor a university hat.  The
universities were certainly in at the beginning of the period (via nfsnet
and other nets in the USA, janet in the UK, earnet in the UK and much of the
rest of Europe, and various other nets).  Connection was not free - you
needed a link to an node or gateway somewhere near you, and that link cost
money.  In the US, links  from your local net to the internet were typically
40.8kbits/sec (or some multiple), in Europe 48kbits/sec and 64kbits/sec and
multiples were both common); on both sides of the pond these links were
usually leased lines (although there were packet-switched paid by traffic
volume networks too, mostly left of the pond), and the various universities,
defence contractors, research institutes (both government and
non-government), and defence agencies paid the telecommunication providers a
pretty large sum for them.  Of course a University or a research institute
wouldn't charge its faculty members and research students for use in the
course of their work, any more than a defence contractor or a government
agency would charge its employess for use in the course of their work and
maybe that's what you mean when you claim it was free; but that's a bit like
saying that because I don't pay for the desk I sit at to do my work, or the
chair I sit on, or the office they are located in, the desk, chair, and
office are free when clearly they are not - my employer pays for them.  The
various agencies (Universities, research institutes, companies) which
provided the component networks on internet paid for the communication lines
forming those too.  They also paid for the (much faster) local networks
(typically 10Mbit/sec within a small group of buildings) but that of course
was much cheaper than the longer connections.

When I first began getting the general public onto the net for merely
having $20 to spend in 1989 yes, people raved that it was outrageous
that what was previously free was now being charged for, where would
this lead!?

I realy don't understand this.  You must have come across a bunch of idiots.
It had never been free.  Of course if you were offereing some outfit like a
university or a research agency or a defence contractor the opportunity to
pay $20 per employee in addition to paying for the communications
infrastructure needed to supply a decent high-speed connection they might
have though it a little outrageous.

I think it all worked out mostly ok, regardless of the protestations
of the demagogues who insisted that the net should be free and they
alone should have the power to decide who gets access to that free
resource.

Do you have any evidence (apart from your own assertion) that such
demagogues ever existed?  There was discussion and disputation about opening
up the internet to a wider community, because those who paid for the
expensive (and in those days they were very expensive) long distance links
like for example the transatlantic link between janet and nfsnet (with its
two ends at UKC and MIT in the early days, if I recall correctly) thought
that as they were paying they had the right to excercise some control over
use of the facility - particularly since bandwidth on those long links was
pretty limited and allowing everyone on would take bandwidth away from what
the links were intended for. So the argument was about who should get access
to resources paid for by agencies like NFS, SERC, CERN, DARPA, MoD, and so
on; those organisations most certainly did NOT regard their very expensive
communications capabilities as a "free resource" - and no-one but those
organisations had any effective say in the matter.

Tom


_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg