US/ND-1: Re: US-ND: Two issues

Re: US-ND: Two issues

Rex Buddenberg (budden@nps.navy.mil)
Thu, 29 Aug 96 15:49:18 -0700 

> 
> Turning Schools Systems into businesses:
> 
> 	Schools are educational institutions.  There have often been 
> suggestions that they "resell" servcies of one sort or another to help 
> 
> 	It is a long term mistake to try and turn schools into  

To reinforce this point, a quick review of Internet history is
in order.
http://dubhe.cc.nps.navy.mil/~budden/lecture.notes/internet_history.html
has the class notes that I use to teach this lesson.

In 1988, National Science Foundation took over management of the
Internet from DARPA (this is when the name changed from ARPANET
to Internet).  At that time NSF funded operation of the backbone
(today the NSPs -- network service providers) in toto.  NSF also
subsidized a couple dozen Internet service providers (NEARNET, SURANET,
BARRNET, CERFNET, ...).  These were usually university based and
all were non-profit.  All operated under NSF's acceptable use 
policy which mandated non-commercial use only (a policy which
did allow corporate R&D outfits and even wholly commercial
companies to connect, but for non-commercial use ... became
an unenforcable policy, but got overtaken by events).
	By about 1992, the number of commercial connections
to the Internet overtook the number of R&E (research & education)
connections and has been outstripping ever since.  Note that
this happened while the NSF non-commercial AUP was still in effect.
	In 1993, the NSF subsidies ceased.  In the five years,
the 'net grew from thousands of users to millions of users --
a pretty dramatic scale up.  In the process, DARPA hatched
and NSF nurtured an entire industry which, with the end of the
subisdies, was weaned.  
	And the Internet service providers?  All of them 'went
legit'.  Some reincorporated as tax-paying, commercial use
corporations.  Others got themselves bought by tax-paying,
commercial use companies (NPS gets part of its service from
BARRNET which went commercial by betting bought by BBN).
None, to my knowledge, went away.  And these ISPs got joined
by a much larger throng -- I've heard nose counts of 3000-7000
ISPs in the country today.  And, by going commercial, the 
R&E AUP was no longer applicable.
	
Somehow, I think trying to de-commercialize an industry that
was very carefully and deliberately commercialized by federal
policy (some things inside the Beltway actually do work right)
is not a direction we should be working in.

Rex Buddenberg