Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id CAA18969; Tue, 24 Dec 1996 02:58:33 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 24 Dec 1996 02:58:33 -0500 (EST) From: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu (TELECOM Digest Editor) Message-Id: <199612240758.CAA18969@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Subject: TELECOM Digest V16 #677 TELECOM Digest Tue, 24 Dec 96 02:58:00 EST Volume 16 : Issue 677 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: WebTV and CoyoteNet; a Minority Report (Brett Frankenberger) Re: WebTV and CoyoteNet; a Minority Report (Morgan Warstler) Re: Echelon: The Global Surveillance System (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh) Re: The InterNIC: A Case Study in Bad Database Management (H. Gorman) Re: The InterNIC: A Case Study in Bad Database Management (M. Deignan) Re: Kid-Safe ISPs (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh) Re: Kid-Safe ISPs (Andy McFadden) FCC Wants Lower International Settlement Fees (oldbear@arctos.com) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: brettf@netcom.com (Brett Frankenberger) Subject: Re: WebTV and CoyoteNet; a Minority Report Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest) Date: Tue, 24 Dec 1996 04:05:32 GMT In article , wrote: > Allow me to be the curmudgeon for a moment ... Your factual observations are right on, IMO ... but I'm not sure the implications are as far reaching as you predict ... read on ... > My concerns have to do with quality and quantity, as well as "net > culture". WebTV seems to be taking the the same fine quality delta > that AOLine has been known for, and moving it several notches further. > No doubt we'll pick up a few eloquent voices, a few urban poets of > great vision, and a few unsong heros. But in all honestly, WebTV aims > to bring massive numbers of the couch potato "I pay you to keep me > amused" folks online. > The goal is to ultimately expand the user base > for the Internet by many fold, swamping the current users and any 'net > culture' they might still have; there will be little chance to > "enculturate" the newcomers with any of the values or (sub)culture of > the old internet -- their "culture" will be manufactured the big media > corporations. There never has been a "Net Culture". The net is just silicon and copper. What manifested itself as the Net Culture had less to do with the Net and more to do with the people on the Net. When the Net was less accessible, it took a certain type of person to get onto it (i.e. University Research Type or at least a Hacker-type with some friends who know how to get on). As the Net became more accessible, it expanded around these circles. For example, anyone at a University could get an account without having a specific research need ... and bulletin boards, etc, began to connect to the net so that any computer-geek, instead of just well-connected (no pun intended) computer-geeks, could get on. What we then wound up with was, not a culture of the Net, but rather, the culture of the people who made up the Net manifesting itself on the Net. The Net only facilitates letting these kinds of people get togethor. Rather than discussing on the telephone what I was interested in with people who shared that interest, I could discuss it over the Net. And reach many more people who shared my interests that way. This will not change. I am not the "couch potato - I pay you to keep me informed type" and I (hopefully) never will be. Nor will I ever use the Net in that fashion. Unfortunately, personality types such as those of the people who initially made up the Net are a minority in society. And, as a result, as the Net becomes more ubiquitous, such personality types will also become a minority on the Net. This is neither a good thing or a bad thing -- it is probably somewhat of a bad thing that the majority of the population wants to sit in front of X (whether X is WebTV or broadcast TV or whatever) and be entertained, but that was a bad thing before the web existed. But the increase in mindless content doesn't decrease the mindful content. Nor does it change the Web, except in the area of percentages. The amount of truely "useful" content on the Net is not decreasing. It is merely increasing less rapidly than the about of "crap" that is appearing on the Net. No, www.cbs.com is not a site where I will probably spend any signifigant amount of time. But the fact that is exists doesn't harm me, and the fact that lots of people stare at such sites doesn't harm me either. I can still discuss whatever meaningful topics that I wish over the Net. The difference is that the couch-potato next door (figuratively speaking -- no offense to my neighbors :) ) can post about his favorite Bay Watch episode, or whatever he wishes. The only disappointment I see is for those who had hoped that the Internet would revolutionize society. Turn all couch-potatos into actual, thinking citizens/netizens. Bring everyone into a wonderful world full of meaningful discussions and mindful content. I never expected that to happen, and don't currently expect that it will happen. The net is only a tool. It will help couch potatos be better couch potatos. It will help researchers be better researchers. And so on. And so on. But it won't turn couch potatos into something else. > My predictions: the differentiation into 'info providers' and 'informa- > tion consumers' will continue to accelerate, with collaboration, peer > networks, information sharing, volunteerism and mutuality becoming > ever less used concepts. I agree only on the percentage basis. The total amount of "peer-to-peer" content will not decrease. But it will increase at a rate slower than the "info provider" content. So you will end up with a large percentage of the content being info-provider content, but the actual amount of non-prodiver content won't be less than it would have been if not for the info-providers. That is, I don't see anyone deciding skip making a quality site, and instead make a lame personal site, just so he has more time to go visit www.nekkid-gurls.com. > Most newspapers are calculatedly written for a 4th grade reading level > today, a least common denominator and thus very large market. This is > well documented and verifiable, not just an opinion. Pages designed > for WebTV will aim lower if anything. More than a few sentences on a > page will be inconsistent with the viewership. This *IS* a change > from the old Internet, no matter that some apologists will try to make > it a shameful, elitist thing for us to notice such facts. But that's not the type of page I am interested in anyway. Are you suggesting that a large entertainment company, say, NBC, might actually make meaningful content if it weren't for WebTV? I don't think so. It's more likely that they wouldn't make *any* content if no means existed for the mindless masses to get on the Internet and see their page. This is not a zero sum game. All the content that you always liked will still be there. It's just that, additionally, we'll have content for the couch potoatos. And since couch potatos make up a large percentage of the population, there will be a lot of Web Sites directed to them. > Oh, another prediction: personal websites will become the message > doormats, bumperstickers, painted mailboxes, answering machine > messages, and "personalized greeting cards" (ref Target or Kmart) of > the future. Again, no change. Just additions. Your Web Site won't change. Most of my friends' Web Sites won't change. (I don't yet have a Web Site). But there will be a lot more personal Web Sites, and many of them will be the sort of tripe you describe above. > "Look it up on the Web" educational assistance will in many, perhaps > most, cases become another tool for kids to regurgitate rather than > learn. But the kids doing that are the same kids who are today plagerizing one encyclopadeia and then listing five others as references. The Net makes legitimate research easier, it also makes bad research easier. But it won't make good researchers become bad researchers, nor will it make poor researchers into good researchers. > Online discussion groups, whether Usenet or mailing lists, will be > deluged with folks who don't contribute much. They will either be > looking for free advice (the internet has been sold as this) This is one place where we will have to adapt. Without a doubt there is a change here -- newsgroups that used to be perfectly good places to have technical discussions and/or meaningful discussions about non-technical things are now little more than flame-fests and/or forums for the clueless to ask about thus and such. (This isn't an entirely web-based phenomenon, BTW. I've talked to college professors who routinely get (paper) letters from crackpots who claim to have found ways to trisect angles, build perpetual motion machines, whatever. The Net just makes it easier for those crackpots to find appropriate "experts.") This is the same as everywhere else -- the amount of useful content is still increasing -- but just not as fast as the amount of useless content. Unfortunately, while it's relatively easy to avoid the crap on the web, it's much harder in newsgroups. This will have to play itself out. Perhaps after enough flames, the word will spread wide enough. Or maybe we'll end up with a lot more moderated groups. The changing of Usenet is a very real phenomenon, and is already in progress. (September 1993 -- the September that Never Ended.) > So there will be much movement to implement cable modems and > xDSL (especially ADSL), to give every one of those consumers 1.5-8 > Mbps of download channel. Think what that means: ONE NEIGHBORHOOD > could saturate today's entire backbone, and one city could require the > backbone to expand 100 fold to keep up (not likely to be well funded > by $19.95/month). Increasing backbone capacity is easier than increasing subscriber capacity. So the backbone will almost certainly keep up. > The internet infrastructure of 2005 > will be optimized for "broadcast" information from "megasite" > producers to mass consumers who are mostly passive except for "channel > surfing", rather than for information collaboration among relative > peers. Organizationally it will resemble today's television industry > much more than 1990's internet. It may even merge into one industry > with television. > And it may "penalize" atypical interests. "Geraldo Online" is going > to be quick to download, because six other people on your block are > viewing it too, after that reference on TV this evening. But you may > have to wait for anything non-faddish and uncached to download. Yes, the mindless stuff will load faster than the mindful stuff, because of the caching. But we'll need bigger pipes to fill the caches, and the mindful stuff will benefit from those caches. The result is that mindful content will speed up because of bigger pipes. Mindless content will speed up even more because it will be more readily cached, but the mindful content will still benefit from the bigger backbone pipes that keep the caches full. > Some will say that WebTV "democratizes" the net, making it more > accessible and representative, empowering more people. To some degree > it might, for some people. But the overall thrust is NOT coming from > the grass roots. This is not a project wherein inner city > neighborhoods gets together than uses the network to organize > politically, to nourish and expand their non-mainstream culture, to > address their real life problems like gangs or jobs. It's a creation > of Phillips and Sony and RCA and Disney and Time and Reuters and > NBC/ABC/CBS/CNN and Paramount and all the same extremely wealthy and > powerful commercial portions of our society that have dominated and > controlled the mainstream media. They will tout isolated examples of > good deeds in things like inner cities, but those are PR; the core of > this change in direction is based on the exact same agendas and > worldviews that control TV or People magazine (or major sports teams). > Has the ubiquity of CocaCola ads or the popularity of Cheers > democratized the world? Here we agree completely. The Web will not democratize the world. It represents only an incremental change. It's a new media. Technically quite different than existing media, but fundamentally the same. > The best I can hope for now is to keep alive some "commercially > unviable" niches of intelligent and thoughtful discussion, peer > creativity, collaborative information exchange, and free and diverse > thought that will never show up significantly on CBS's broadcasts or > AT&T's web sites. My point exactly. But those niches will be bigger than the Net initally was. Instead of 90% of a relatively small Net, we'll have .1% of an outrageously huge net. We come out ahead, even if some other people come out more ahead. And we'll benfit from the infrastructure put in place to help "them". > Trying to write well, thinking before replying, critically > examining alternatives - there should remain a niche on the internet > where these continue to be more valued than buying a new car because > it's advertized as somehow making you more potent. This niche will remain, just as it continues to exist in the non-Internet world. This is my fundamental point. The Net as we know it will continue to exist ... just as a subset of a much larger net. My other point would be that no new media is likely going to completely change the nature of the average lazy person. Those who had hoped that the Net would radically democratize society -- give everyone a voice and make everyone a mindful productive netizen -- are going to be disappointed. Those who do not want to be "democraticized" are not going to be ... not via the Net ... not via anything else. Brett (brettf@netcom.com) [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Do you *really* believe that 'the net as we know it will continue to exist ...' ? I am wondering how many families in the United States during Christmas, 1996 will open their gifts to one another and find a Web TV device? And how many will be thrilled with this wonderful new possession and hook it up immediatly to get on the web and the net for the first time? I'll bet their numbers will be legion. Years and years ago, in the CB Radio days, when CB was to a small elite group what Usenet was to many of us five or ten years ago, it was inevitable that the busiest days of the year for traffic on the radio were Christmas and the week or so following. We would joke and kid around about it the week before Christmas saying to one another, 'expect to hear a lot of new voices and strange people beginning in a few days ...' and indeed, we always would. Starting Christmas Day, they'd be out there in droves. Every one of them so proud of their new radio and new ability to communicate. You see, CB Radio was going to 'democraticize' the world. Everyone was now going to have a chance to participate in the lively conversations which took place night after night on the 11-meter airwaves across America. The veteran CB-ers were in two camps: there were a large number who would harass the new guys to the point they would give up and no longer participate. It was common to just 'throw carrier' at them, 'walk on them' and otherwise jam their signals making it impossible for them to participate. The other camp took the position that everyone was new at some point or another, and that it reflected well on all of us to be as charitable as possible to the new guys, even if the new guys acted ignorant and had no interest at all in the 'gentlemens agreements' which the rest of the CB community observed, i.e. teenagers would talk on one channel, the politicians and philosophers on another channel, the people who were interested in sports on another channel, and *never* any commercial advertising, etc. Then within a week or two after the holiday was over, as the new year go underway, a lot of very disillusioned people would unplug their radio and put it in a closet somewhere to gather dust. I suspect we will have a lot of new netters with us beginning later this week. Don't forget, people also buy computers for their kids at Christmas, and I would like to suggest we all take the high road and assume that everyone of them mean well until as *individuals* they prove themselves otherwise. To say that someone 'means well' is not to say they are not ignorant; it is not to say there won't be lots of chain letters and spams and other nuisances. But I dunno ... let's just wish one another a happy holiday and seek out the best of the net where we can find it. You can probably tell I am very ambivilent on this point; there are days I feel like unplugging my terminal and tossing it all in also; yet when you least expect it, you meet the *nicest* people. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Morgan Warstler Subject: Re: WebTV and CoyoteNet; a Minority Report Date: Tue, 24 Dec 1996 17:41:22 -0800 Organization: Earthlink Network, Inc. Reply-To: dmcopy@earthlink.net All I care about is the sound bite: > The internet is the latest orange grove to be turned into (almost) > indistinguishable suburbs modeled on those left by mass TV, radio, > magazines and newspapers. WebTV is the bulldozers and contract > assemblers putting up more ticky tacky boxes on the hillside. Rather > than the internet culture following the path of the Amazon tribe whose > land has been "developed", let's think more like the coyote, and > co-exist in the "unprofitable" margins. I only care about the sound bite because that's all I need. You see, it's not that I didn't have time to read your thoughts, it's that I refuse to believe you needed all that space to say what you said. I won't demean you by allowing you to ramble on. I expect you to evolve and express concisely. This is why the sound bite culture is SUPERIOR to your mythical elite village. I don't do computers, I do communication. As a theory, I posit: it is more effective to trade 500 sound bites back and forth, then to have each side (assuming bipolar theory) develop a single persuasive case for it's view. What's more, 1000 rapid stream images blown over a two minute period can convey all the thought and depth of the entire Lincoln-Douglas debates. Finally, the best part about the unwashed masses is that they don't give a damn about your feelings of web ownership. It's that very attitude of theirs which makes them INHERENTLY GOOD. So, I put it to you: Can you defend your feelings of ownership? If not, what right do you have to care if it is destroyed? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Your point is good in the sense that there are so many 'old timers' on the net -- myself included -- who talk about 'their net' as though they did have some ownership rights. I'll admit it, I am guilty of it also. The fact is, very few of us own anything except our own computers (and maybe our employer owns that also ... ) and we participate here purely through the good will of the companies/institutions which do pay the bills. So readers, how *do* you defend your feelings of ownership if you do, and what right *do* you have to say the direction things should be going? Did I open up a hornet's nest here? .... PAT] ------------------------------ From: rishab@nntp.best.com (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh) Subject: Re: Echelon: The Global Surveillance System Date: 23 Dec 1996 21:56:16 GMT Organization: Best Internet Communications It's only to be expected that the NSA and friends try to monitor e-mail and other data traffic. Now I'm probably _really_ stupid, but if the NSA had the technology to do good, high-volume (HIGH!) "keyword" recognition on intercepted voice traffic - or even fax traffic - it would sell it and make pots of money to buy the new toys that tight-fisted Congress denies it. I don't believe they have the technology to do much of what Nicky Hager's article describes - i.e. sure all those spooks may intercept traffic, but they couldn't make much sense of it. I _do_ believe that the NSA could make a lot of sense of huge volumes of data traffic, which is why good people must include lots of spookbait in their mail (terrorist bomb Hamas Iran Clinton CIA nuclear sarin) to keep them usefully occupied. Why do I believe this? Because the NSA has been flogging this tech to the private sector. See for example, _Science_ 10 Feb 1995 (vol. 267 p. 843) "Guaging similarity with n-grams: language- independent categorisation of text" by Marc Damashek of a familiar Fort Meade, DoD address. The same technology is referred to in the old post by Bruce Schneier attached below. When the NSA starts selling voice-recognition technology ("language- independent"!) _then_ it's time to worry. Right now, just use PGP. -Rishab Newsgroups: sci.crypt,alt.security,alt.privacy From: schneier@chinet.chinet.com (Bruce Schneier) Subject: "Interesting Stuff" Checkers at the NSA Message-ID: Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX Date: Thu, 19 May 1994 17:40:15 GMT This is from a flyer that NSA people have been distributing: NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY -- TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER Information Sorting and Retrieval by Language or Topic Description: This technique is an extremely simple, fast, completely general mathod of sorting and retrieving machine- readable text according to language and/or topic. The method is totally independent of the particular languages or topics of interest, and relies for guidance solely upon exemplars (e.g., existing documents, fragments, etc.) provided by the user. It employs no dictionaries keywords, stoplists, stemmings, syntax, semantics, or grammar; nevertheless, it is capable of distinguishing among closely related toopics (previously considered inseparable) in any language, and it can do so even in text containing a great many errors (typically 10 - 15% of all characters). The technique can be quickly implemented in software on any computer system, from microprocessor to supercomputer, and can easily be implemented in inexpensive hardware as well. It is directly scalable to very large data sets (millions of documents). Commercial Application: Language and topic-independent sorting and retieval of documents satisfying dynamic criteria defined only by existing documents. Clustering of topically related documents, with no prior knowledge of the languages or topics that may be present. It desired, this activity can automatically generate document selectors. Specializing sorting tasks, such as identification of duuplicate or near-duplicate documents in a large set. National Security Agency Research and Technology Group - R Office of Research and Technology Applications (ORTA) 9800 Savage Road Fort George G. Meade, MD 20755-6000 (301) 688-0606 If this is the stuff they're giving out to the public, I can only imagine what they're keeping for themselves. Bruce ************************************* Bruce Schneier Counterpane Systems For a good prime, call 391581 * 2^216193 - 1 schneier@chinet.com ------------------------------ From: hillary@hillary.net (Hillary Gorman) Subject: Re: The InterNIC: A Case Study in Bad Database Management Date: 23 Dec 1996 20:51:42 GMT Organization: Packet Shredders Anonymous In , Monty Solomon wrote: > Date: Thu, 12 Dec 1996 17:07:04 -0500 > From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" > Subject: The InterNIC: a case study in bad database management > Foo, Inc. would rather not let records remain in the InterNIC > database claiming that Joe works for them when in fact he does not. > Therefore, they want to contact the InterNIC and tell them, "Look, the > information in Joe Admin's contact record which says that he for us is > incorrect. You can confirm this by attempting to send E-mail to the > address in the record, or by calling the phone number in the record > and asking to speak to him. The person who answers will confirm that > he no longer works there. Please either delete the contact record > completely or remove the information in it which associates Joe Admin > with Foo, Inc." Sending a fax on Foo, Inc letterhead, or a certified letter on same, is what I have been advised to do, what NIC reps on the ISP mailing list have suggested, and it works for me and many others ... ------------------------------ From: kd1hz@anomaly.ideamation.com (Michael P. Deignan) Subject: Re: The InterNIC: A Case Study in Bad Database Management Date: 23 Dec 1996 16:23:42 -0500 Organization: The Ace Tomato Company > From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" > Subject: The InterNIC: a case study in bad database management [64-million-dollar mismanagement story deleted] You think that trying to change existing Internic records are bad, just try getting a new block of IP address assignments from them! I manage a large munipical wide-area-network. I filed paperwork with the Internic on several occasions asking for a block of Class-C IP address assignments to use on my network. The response, each time, was that I should contact my ISP and obtain IP address allocations from them. So, I wrote back explaining that I was a large municipal wide-area network, and like many municipalities, the ISP was not 'set-in-stone' as it was a service that goes out to competitive bid every year or so. I explained that I was in no position to manually re-assign the IP address on the hundreds of machines under my control on a yearly basis should the ISP winning the contract change. Their response? "Please contact your ISP for an IP address allocation". I went through this four times over the past year. I still don't have a block of IP addresses. I gave up six months ago and just selected a block at random to use. If and when we ever do connect to the Internet (not a high priority right now anyway) I'll worry about it then (and probably use another tool like a proxy server to "fix" it.) Of course, what type of behavior do you really expect from a monopoly? Anyone want to start a competing Internic? At $64 million dollars in revenue for one year alone I'm sure we can get the venture capital needed to properly fund the expedition. MD ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Kid-Safe ISPs Date: Wed, 24 Dec 1996 03:50:55 GMT From: rishab@dxm.org (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh) Reply-To: rishab@dxm.org deh@atype.com wrote: >> Obscenity has always been illegal on the Net under US >> law. Indeed it is under existing obscenity statutes that BBS sysops >> (AABBS) were prosecuted. > Wasn't the Adult Action case based on a local statue, not US federal law? Under federal law, obscenity is a crime, although the precise definition of what is and is not obscene is left to "local standards". That's how AABBS was violating _federal_ law although its content was obscene only by local standards, albeit local to another state. That's why I suggested updation of the obscenity "local standards" definition to deal with the Net. Rishab ------------------------------ From: fadden@netcom.com (Andy McFadden) Subject: Re: Kid-Safe ISPs Organization: Lipless Rattling Crankbait Date: Tue, 23 Dec 1996 21:03:48 GMT In article , Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote: > To Hillary and the other ISP owners out there - you can do this by > setting up a proxy server with one of those nanny programs, as well as > killing many of the nastier newsgroups. You're providing an extra > service, so you can charge for it. I don't agree with Pat that it's > every ISPs duty to make their systems kid-safe. Some will want to > address that market, others need not. It's probably better that way, > because those who want unrestricted access will know where to go - > maybe eventually adult ISPs will be the more expensive - and not > clutter previously kid-safe newsgroups. WebTV offers kid-safe surfing at no extra charge. It comes in two forms, "black list" (which bans certain sites) and "white list" (which only allows you to go to approved sites). You can choose to allow e-mail or not. If WebTV does become a major consumer force, it might show the pro-CDA people that it really is possible to let your kids loose on the Internet without putting severe restrictions on content. fadden@netcom.com (Andy McFadden) Friends don't let friends patent software -- http://www.lpf.org/ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 23 Dec 1996 10:17:28 -0500 From: The Old Bear Subject: FCC Wants Lower International Settlement Fees FCC HAS PLANS FOR SLASHING OVERSEAS PHONE RATES The Federal Communications Commission has developed a new set of substantially lower benchmark "settlement fees," which are the payments that phone companies make to each other for completing each their calls. Because U.S. carriers send more calls overseas than they receive, the system results in a net outflow of $5 billion from the U.S. to foreign phone service providers, who in many cases have used the funds to build their own networks. Some analysts say that the FCC plan could harm developing countries, which have the least competitive phone markets. source: New York Times December 19, 1996 page C4 ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V16 #677 ******************************