NSFnet goes commercial
Mark Lottor
The following topic surprisingly hasn't seen much discussion on the net.
Apparently, NSF is allowing ANS to sell commerical connections to the
NSFnet, thus allowing commercial traffic to flow over the NSFnet backbone.
This implies that NSF has changed its acceptable use policy and it is now
completely acceptable to use NSFnet for commercial purposes, with your
tax dollars paying the bill.
------------
U.S. SAID TO PLAY FAVORITES IN PROMOTING NATIONWIDE COMPUTER NETWORK
By John Markoff
c.1991 N.Y. Times News Service
Just one week after President Bush signed legislation calling for the
creation of a nationwide computer data "superhighway," a debate has erupted
over whether the government gave an unfair advantage to a joint venture of
IBM and MCI that built and manages a key part of the network.
The IBM-MCI venture, known as Advanced Network and Services, manages a
network called NSFnet, which connects hundreds of research centers and
universities. NSFnet also manages links to dozens of other countries. All
these networks are collectively known as Internet.
Some private competitors say Advanced Network and Services uses its
favored position to squeeze them out of the data-transmission market by
establishing rules that make it difficult to connect to NSFnet.
NSFnet was founded by the National Science Foundation, a federal agency,
and is composed of leased telephone lines that link special computers
called routers, which transmit packages of data to three million users in
33 countries. Data traffic over the NSFnet backbone has doubled in the last
year.
The government wants to develop a national data highway for electronic
commerce, digital video transmissions to homes and vast electronic
libraries that could be drawn on by the nation's schools.
Advanced Network and Services, based in Elmsford, N.Y., was set up last
year as a non-profit corporation with $10 million from International
Business Machines Corp. and MCI Communications Corp. Earlier this year it
set up a for-profit subsidiary, called ANS CO+RE, to sell computer network
services. That led some competitors to complain that Advanced Network and
Services would be able to compete unfairly because of its arrangement with
the government.
People involved in planning for a national data network say it is
essential to provide for fair competition, which will lead rival companies
to offer creative and entrepreneurial services in the hope of building
market share. Without competiton, they say, the government will have
created a monopoly that has little incentive to innovate.
"This is the first major communication business to be born under the
deregulation era," said David Farber, a computer scientist at the
University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer in data networking. "This hasn't
happened since the growth of the telephone industry. You want it to be a
business that doesn't repeat the errors of the past."
In recent years, the National Science Foundation has tried to shift its
operations and ownership of NSFnet to Advanced Network and Services. And it
will try to establish competition through contracts for networks to compete
with NSFnet next year.
But there is no level playing field, complained William L. Schrader,
president of Performance Systems International Inc., a Reston, Va., company
that provides commercial data connections to Internet.
He made public two letters between officials of Advanced Network and
Services and the National Science Foundation that he said gave the company
unfair control over access to the network. The result, he added, was that
the government turned over valuable public property to a private company.
"It's like taking a federal park and giving it to Kmart," Schrader said.
"It's not right, and it isn't going to stand. As a taxpayer, I think it's
disgusting."
Performance Systems and several other companies have set up an
alternative to NSFnet, known as a CIX.
Schrader said his company and the venture of IBM and MCI were competing
for the same customers but unlike his rival he lacked a federal subsidy. He
said he might ask the Internal Revenue Service to look at the business
relationship between Advanced Network's non-profit and for-profit
operations.
Allan Weis, the president of Advanced Network, disputed that his company
had an unfair advantage. "It's a very competitive environment right now,"
he said. "We have lost quite a few bids to PSI and to other competitors as
well."
At the National Science Foundation, Stephen Wolff, director of its
networking division, said IBM and MCI had overbuilt the network and were
selling commercial service based on the excess capacity that was available.
A number of organizations are working informally to settle the dispute.
"I think it's a mess," said Mitchell D. Kapor, the founder of Lotus
Development Corp. and now head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a
public-interest group focusing on public policy issues surrounding data
networks. "Nobody should have an unfair advantage. This is important
because we're talking about something that is in its infancy but that one
day could be on the order of the personal computer industry."
-------
Bob Sutterfield
The following topic surprisingly hasn't seen much discussion on the
net.
There has been plenty of discussion on the mailing list that discusses
commercializing and privatizing the networks, com-...@psi.com. Write
to com-priv-request for pointers to the list's archives, or to
subscribe.