Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id IAA13350; Thu, 19 Dec 1996 08:55:28 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 08:55:28 -0500 (EST) From: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu (TELECOM Digest Editor) Message-Id: <199612191355.IAA13350@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Subject: TELECOM Digest V16 #669 TELECOM Digest Thu, 19 Dec 96 08:55:00 EST Volume 16 : Issue 669 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson How Business Almost Derailed the Net (Monty Solomon) 920 Announced for Wisconsin (John Cropper) Fixed Rate National 800 Service (Steve Sullivan) Re: The Opposition Point of View: FRC on Supreme Court News (Martin Baines) Last Laugh! Ultimate Chain Letter (Scott Hemphill) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of public service systems and networks including Compuserve and America On Line. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. Subscriptions are available to qualified organizations and individual readers. Write and tell us how you qualify: * ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu * The Digest is edited, published and compilation-copyrighted by Patrick Townson of Skokie, Illinois USA. You can reach us by postal mail, fax or phone at: Post Office Box 4621 Skokie, IL USA 60076 Phone: 847-329-0571 Fax: 847-329-0572 ** Article submission address: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Our archives are located at mirror.lcs.mit.edu. The URL is: http://mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives They can also be accessed using anonymous ftp: ftp mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives A third method is the Telecom Email Information Service: Send a note to tel-archives@mirror.lcs.mit.edu to receive a help file for using this method or write me and ask for a copy of the help file for the Telecom Archives. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 22:52:10 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: How Business Almost Derailed the Net Reply-To: monty@roscom.COM Begin forwarded message: Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 10:09:40 -0800 (PST) From: Nathan Newman Subject: [ENODE] How Business Almost Rerailed the Net EEEEE N N OOO DDDD EEEEE E NN N O O D D E EEEE N N N O O D D EEEE E N NN O O D D E EEEEE N N OOO DDDD EEEEE ================================================ DECEMBER 15, 1996 To subscribe to this monthly newletter on information technology and society, send the message "subscribe" to enodelist@garnet.berkeley.edu HOW PRIVATE BUSINESS ALMOST DERAILED THE INTERNET ...AND HOW THEY STILL MAY -- by Nathan Newman, Progressive Communications, newman@garnet.berkeley.edu In a remarkable turn of societal imagination, many conservatives have begun picturing the computer age as the rejuvenation of small-scale entrepreneurial capitalism against the institutions of the nation state. Whether it's Alvin Toffler "quantum revolution" or Newt Gingrich promoting decentralization of economic decision-making to local regions, there has been a steady stream of conservative analysis making the case that new technology has made government's role, especially the federal government's role, irrelevant and even dangerous to the healthy functioning of the economy. Even THE ECONOMIST, a magazine with an early enthusiasm for the Internet and usually a somewhat more balanced eye, has described the success of the Internet as the "triumph of the free market over central planning. Democracy over dictatorship." The new conservative view has been that the private sector is the font of technological and economic innovation. The federal government should get out of the way and leave economic development to the private sector, maybe occasionally working with local governments promoting innovation and job creation locally. What is repressed in this bit of economic myth making is not only the key role the federal government played in each step of the growth of the computer industry, and, to an even larger extent, in the birth and formation of the Internet, but also the fact that left to private industry, much of the computer technology would never have come to market and, in the case of the Internet, the result would have been less innovative and less of an economic engine for growth. In fact, it's unclear that the hallmark of the federally-created Internet would have even occurred out of the private visions and competition of industry. The Internet is in many ways the product of central planning in its rawest form: planning over decades, large government subsidies directed from a national headquarters, and experts designing and overseeing the project's development. The government not only created whole new technologies to make the Internet a possibility, it created the standards for forms of economic exchange of information that had never been possible before. The comparison has been at times to the interstate highway system but the analogy would hold only if employees of the federal government had first imagined the possibility of cars, subsidized the invention of the auto industry, invented the technology of concrete and tar, and built the whole system with only a few stray dirt roads existing anywhere on the assumption that private industry would build along. It's worth remembering that the headlines just a few years back in 1993 about the Information Superhighway were not over the Internet and software companies like Netscape but about mergers and financial deals between those who controlled the cables to the home, on the assumption that those who monopolized control of the physical hardware connecting homes and business would reap monopoly profits in selling information services. As Fortune magazine described the ultimately unsuccessful merger of TCI cable and Bell Atlantic telephone back in 1993, "It was the bold stroke of two captains of industry bent on securing their share of whatever booty washes ashore when the interactive age finally arrives ... When the dust settles, there will probably be eight to ten major operators on the highway, some earning their way mainly by collecting tolls for the use of their networks." In many ways, this private vision harked back not to the original federal highway system but to the first transit system that criss-crossed the nation's land -- the railroads. And in fact, that historical legacy gives some sense of what a privately designed system would have looked like. In the 1840s and 1850s, the first large railways were built, usually with incompatible track widths where trains entering the same city could not switch directly to another company's rail track. This was not accidental but a deliberate strategy by merchants sponsoring one railroad to avoid having another company (usually sponsored by merchants in a the gauges of different train companies were all standardized and freight could be easily transferred from line-to-line for longer distances. Even as such standardization was achieved by the 1880s, giant railroad companies sought to create competing railway systems that could control enough territory to control the flow and pricing of significant portions of freight against competing systems, becoming the first major oligopolies in the US economy. Later columns of ENODE will talk about some broad ways the federal government contributed to the creation of the Internet, but this month I just want to emphasize a number of cases where the private sector either missed where the technology needed to go, or, worse yet, came close to derailing the publicly funded Internet system. In the early sixties, researcher Paul Baran had begun planning how to build the technology necessary for the goal of networking computers. Baran worked at Rand Corporation, a research company setup to monitor and preserve the US government's operations research capability. Worried about the survivability of US communication networks in the case of nuclear war, Baran envisioned the movement from analog telephone signals to digital signals that could perform in a networked system of digital transmission. Instead of a central switching node where the whole wire between two points would be reserved specifically for the sound signals of a specific conversation, such a system would be a "distributed network" with each node connected to its nearest neighbors in a string of connections, much like the child's game of telephone. Allowing fuller use of all lines in the network instead of holding lines open from end-to-end for each message, such a system would have each node would keep track of the fastest route to each destination on the network (and be constantly updated with information from adjoining nodes) and help route information without need of central direction. RAND was enthusiastic about Baran's ideas but when AT&T was approached about its feasibility, AT&T executives dismissed the idea and even refused to share information on their long distance circuit maps -- Baran had to purloin a copy to evaluate his ideas which he and RAND were convinced were right. Based on RAND's recommendation, the Air Force directly asked AT&T to build such a network but AT&T still refused saying it wouldn't work (except for a faction of scientists at Bell Labs). This may have been technical myopia by the business-oriented executives, but it was an economically self-interested myopia. Such a distributed network threatened (and today does threaten) the central economic assets of the telephone industry: central computers and central switches. It highlights the fact that corporate research labs, the main alternative to long-term government funding of technological alternatives, rarely if ever invest in fundamental technology that will likely undermine the natural economic monopolies they currently enjoy. In the meantime, British physicist Donald Davies had begun promoting a similar idea of a computer network with "packets" of information. He soon learned of Baran's similar ideas and was encouraged enough to get support by the British Post Office, notably a state run agency which ran the telephone system in Britain. In 1968, the first computer distributed network was established on computers located at the National Physical Laboratory where Davies worked. It was at the US military's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) that distributed computing would be taken to the next level. Larry Roberts, a researcher from the military-funded Lincoln Labs at MIT, was hired to work on the computer networking project. Starting out at four west cost sites: UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, University of Utah, and the Stanford Research Institute, the plan was to install a new computer at each site as part of the network. In 1968, ARPA advertised the bid for building the specialized computers to be used to run the network. IBM and other big computer companies declined even to make a bid, saying it wasn't possible at a reasonable price. Again, like AT&T, this was partially the myopia of those grounded in older technology but it was also a self-interested economic fear of the new timesharing minicomputer technology (itself recently heavily funded by ARPA) that was challenging the dominance of companies like IBM. They rightly feared that networking would make many government agencies and businesses rethink the need to actually own their own mainframe computer. In the end, the small (600 employees) consulting firm of Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) did the work. BBN was intimately tied to MIT and it was sometimes called the "third university" in Cambridge. With the promise of a large government contract and the top technical talent of mostly MIT graduate students, BBN was able to take on a task that only a large company could have done without such a government contract. By October 1969, the network connection between SRI and UCLA was established and within months, all four nodes were on-line. By the time the network was demonstrated publicly for the first time at the International Conference on Computer Communications in October 1972, there were twenty-nine "nodes" in the network (dubbed at this point ARPANET) clustered in four areas: Boston, DC, Los Angeles and San Francisco. What would evolve into the Internet had been born. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, ARPA would build a national community of public-minded experts who helped shepherd open Internet standards that would radically expand the network to a wide range of users. In doing so, it was clear that the public- spirited professional norms promoted by ARPA and the community of researchers was critical in keeping individual profit-taking from undermining that openness. In 1973, ARPA's networking head Larry Roberts was hired by BBN to run a private packet switching network subsidiary called TELENET (which would evolve into SprintNet). In coming to BBN, Roberts carefully deflected a bid by BBN to take over the ARPANET privately. And his ARPA successor J.C.R. Licklider, a key researcher in building the ARPAnet and one-time BBN employee, was faced with his old employer BBN refusing to publish the original computer code for the networking computer routers they had designed, while at the same time becoming more and more reluctant to fix software bugs on the ARPANET. Licklider, in the name of the openness of the Net, threatened to hold up BBN's federal contract funds unless they released the code publicly. BBN published the code, enhancing the tradition of open codes in the development of standards. Ironically, as networks spread in the 1980s, it was the government experts at ARPA and universities who backed the flexible, tested TCP/IP protocol, while big private companies like MCI, IBM and Hewlett Packard adopted an untested, bureaucratically inspired standard created in international committees called OSI. Vincent Cerf, the creator of the TCP/IP system who is now a Vice-President at MCI, had been hired in 1983 to build MCI's message networking system and he remembers, "So I had to build MCI Mail out of a dog's breakfast of protocols." It was only with the technical dominance of the Internet that most private industry would convert over to the public TCP/IP protocol. The other key thing to understand is the government's role in being the source of much of the commercial business explosion in Internet-related business. This goes beyond merely creating the Internet itself but to directly being the source of the energy that the private sector is directing to this area of economic innovation. Mitch Kapor, the founder of the software company Lotus, has argued, "Encouraged by its successor, the rapidly expanding government/academic [Internet], the commercial internet ... represents the natural development and expansion of a successful government enterprise." The political economist Karl Polanyi argued half a century ago that "The road to the free market was opened and kept open by the enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism." The reality is that the Internet is no accident but neither was it a technological inevitability. It was the product of a US federal government, in association with other nation's experts, guiding its evolution, in demanding that its standards be open and in the public domain, and that its reach be extended broadly enough to overwhelm the proprietary corporate competitors. It is under such an open system that small companies can create Internet-related software products and know that they will be compatible with other products given the pervasiveness of the standards. The fate of the companies that were building Microsoft's proprietary network -- dropped by Microsoft and left with a useless set of products when Microsoft switched to Internet standards -- shows the shadow life of companies that depend on the whims of corporate standards. The open standards of the Internet and the easy distribution of products assures that new companies have the ability to at least attempt to take on established players without having the technology itself used as a block against them. This is critical for a whole range of information-based industries that Stanford economist Brian Arthur has argued are governed by the law of increasing returns for investment. The argument (which Arthur submitted as part of a legal brief to the Justice Department against Microsoft's original proprietary system and its incorporation into its Windows 95 operating system) is that because of a range of built-in advantages for early innovators, companies that attain initial control of a market have a massive advantage over latecomers. Because business customers for software demand compatibility with other products they use and because they have to invest training time to use the initial product, those customers are often reluctant to change products, so early entrants to a market often have an overwhelming advantage in holding onto their market dominance. By assuring a degree of compatibility of all programs and cutting distribution costs, the Internet mediates against the worst monopoly effects of this increasing returns effect. This privatization of the Internet threatens further evolution of the Internet. This extends from the coordination of networking to avoid capacity overload to the danger that standards and protocol design are being shaped more and more to commercial needs. While the overall compatibility of systems through the IP protocol is unlikely to be undermined in the near term, related standards such as Web browsers are being increasingly designed with commercial interests in mind. When Netscape or Microsoft design their browsers, they are marketing not to individual users (who generally receive the browsers for free) but to the purchasers of related software that depend on the standards determined by the browsers. If the base of a particular broser standard is high enough, corporations will buy particular server software from the producer of that standard browser so that consumers can access the bells and whistles associated with that brand of browser. This is in many ways analogous to broadcast television where stations sell "audiences" to advertisers. This is a recipe for concentration of standards in few hands, since the federal government has largely bowed out of intervention to assure broad participation in the design of standards for the Web. What is worth emphasizing is that the federal government did a very good job for twenty-five years in designing and guiding the standards and development of the Internet. Putting some regulatory teeth back into government standards committees is an infinitely preferable alternative to letting Microsoft's or Netscape's corporate strateges in selling server software to other companies determine the standards with which the rest of us have to live. --- end --- --------------------------------------------------- ENODE: to loose, untie a knot; to solve a riddle. E-NODE is a monthly column about the Internet. To subscribe to E-NODE, send the following email to enodelist@garnet.berkeley.edu: subscribe e-node ENODE is brought to you by Progressive Communications, a policy research and computer consulting firm. ------------------------------ From: John Cropper Subject: 920 Announced for Wisconsin Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 16:42:05 -0500 Organization: MindSpring Reply-To: psyber@mindspring.com From Action 2 News in Green Bay: Northeast Wisconsin's New Area Code Announced A public education campaign will soon get underway to promote a new area code for Northeast Wisconsin. Because of a growing number of telephone numbers, including cellular phones, fax machines, pagers, and computer modems, Wisconsin is quickly outgrowing the 414 area code. Starting July 26, 1997, callers can use both the old 414 area code and the new area code -- 920. After October 25, 1997, use of the 920 area code will be required. The 920 area code covers all or part of 20 counties in Wisconsin: (Areas based on map provided by telecommunications companies) Brown Oconto (southeast half) Shawano (far eastern quarter) Marinette (southcentral portion) Door Kewaunee Outagamie (all but northwest corner) Waupaca (eastern third) Winnebago Calumet Manitowoc Sheboygan Waushara Green Lake (all but far southwestern corner) Marquette (far northeast corner) Fond du Lac Columbia (eastern third) Dodge Jefferson (all but far western portion and southeastern corner) Washington (far northwestern corner) Ozaukee (far northern portion) Waukesha (far northwestern corner) Customers with questions about the plan can contact the area code information hotline at: 1-800-378-2222 . John Cropper voice: 888.NPA.NFO2 LINCS 609.637.9434 PO Box 277 fax: 609.637.9430 Pennington, NJ 08534-0277 mailto:psyber@mindspring.com http://www.the-server.com/jcbt2n/lincs/ ------------------------------ From: Steve Sullivan Subject: Fixed Rate National 800 Service Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 09:50:58 -0800 Organization: Fishnet Internet Services Pardon the post but I am looking for a list of ISPs and other service providers that would benefit from a fixed monthly rate 800 service. There are no per minute charges or hourly charges. This would allow an ISP to become a national provider with a national 800 number. The service allows for up to 4000 concurrent users. If you are interested and would like more information or know of how to contact ISPs please respond to on of the locations below. Thanks in Advance. Steve Sullivan Franklin Internet steves@ftel.net ------------------------------ From: Martin Baines Subject: Re: The Opposition Point of View: FRC on Supreme Court News Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 17:08:19 +0000 Organization: Silicon Graphics Craig Macbride wrote: > Clayton E. Cramer writes: >> There are a lot of people out there who have no idea the damage that >> exposure to a group like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teens would >> do to a child. > The average child will not be interested or even go far enough to > download and decode what's there, but that's not even the point. > The net is a large, easy to access part of the world. You can post > defamatory items and end up in jail, book airline or hotel tickets > that must be paid for, etc. This is not a kiddies' playground. Do you > let a 10 year old borrow the car and do a cross-country trip in it? If > not, you shouldn't be letting them on the net either. > The extremist viewpoint here is that somehow everyone else should be > looking out for the wellbeing of children of inexcuseably stupid > parents, no matter how inconvenient that may be for us all. Something that occured to me recently -- the issue of parental responsibility ties in with issues like how we price access to the Internet. E.g. if the marginal telecoms costs for Internet access are effectively zero (i.e locals calls are free), there is no financial incentive for parents to even consider installing another line for their kids exclusive use. I know of several cases here in the UK, where parents have stopped their kids using the Internet because of the huge increase in their phone bill. It may not be the ideal way of "helping" parents act responsibly, but it's better than nothing. In an ideal world everyone would do the right thing, but we don't live in an ideal world! I completely agree with Clive Feather's earlier post about control of Internet content, but as Clive is part of the management of the UK's largest ISP he should have good insight! Martin Baines - Telecommunications Market Consultant Silicon Graphics, Arlington Business Park, Reading, RG7 4SB, UK email: martinb@reading.sgi.com SGI vmail: 6-788-7842 phone: +44 118 925 7842 fax: +44 118 925 7545 URL: http://reality.sgi.com/martinb_reading/ Silicon Surf: http://www.sgi.com/International/UK/ ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 Dec 96 07:25 PST From: Scott Hemphill Subject: Last Laugh! Ultimate Chain Letter __FORWARD_ Heh heh heh The ultimate in get-rich-quick schemes! Subject: Humor(G): Ultimate Chain Letter Date: Wednesday, December 18, 1996 3:41 AM Hi, my name is Aloysius. Five years ago I had no money. People wanted me to pay for services that I had used, yet I had no funds to pay them with. Then an amazing thing happened! A friend of mine told me about a place where people get together for about 8 hours at a time. While together, these `employees' provide services, build things, add value to things, and even manage the activities of others. All this is done in exchange for money, often paid at the completion of 40 hours of activity. My friend told me that if I joined him, the people at this place would give me money too! In time, they may even give me lots of money, and I mean a LOT of money. Just imagine my joy at being told of a system that would enable me to pay for all the things I want and need! I was so happy to learn of this system that I set out on a mission. There are too many people on the Internet who have not yet discovered this method of obtaining money. Instead, these misguided souls participate in schemes that promise thousands of dollars in exchange for an illegal five dollar investment. If you read any Usenet newsgroup on a regular basis, you know the people I mean. They post messages such as: " Big Money NOW ", "Fast Cash NOW" and " Get out of Debt and into Jail, NOW!" These unfortunates must hear this message of great joy and good fortune: GET A JOB AND STOP FLOODING THE INTERNET WITH GET RICH QUICK SCHEMES!!!! I invite you to join me in this quest. How? Simple! Whenever someone posts an illegal get-rich-quick-scheme to your favorite newsgroup, simply E-mail this letter back to them. An additional step may be required to deliver the good news to people who post these messages under phony e-mail addresses. For them, a hard copy of this letter to their postal address may be required. (They always include a postal address because that's where they want you to send the BIG MONEY.) It has also been suggested to me that people may wish to send this letter to the Sysop or Postmaster of the letter writer's Internet Service Provider. I think this is a great idea, and I fully encourage further suggestions for improving the delivery of this good news! You have my permission to copy this letter. Feel free to add your name to mine and those listed here, (when and if people decide to add their names to this letter), or remain anonymous and send it as is. ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V16 #669 ******************************