Re: Verizon rules the World? Or just the U.S.?


On Wed, 2 Jul 2008 20:25:56 -0700 (PDT), ELF
<michael.w.fisher@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jul 2, 10:37 am, Jim Gysin <jimgy...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 1 Jul 2008 18:19:06 -0700 (PDT), ELF

<michael.w.fis...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jun 30, 5:09 pm, Lance Manyon <rastall...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:27:22 -0400, Francis A. Miniter wrote:
I have Comcast.net and have no trouble.

What I forgot to say was that this just started a couple days ago.
First the two free servers I use for binaries got blocked, then,
today, my text server in Germany (Motzarella) got blocked, so I had to
use AT&T's. It hasn't affected my groups, but it means that big
business is trying to control Usenet.

Big business is not trying to control the Usenet.

Big businesses are protecting their bottom lines from legal actions by
governments or shareholders.

Unfortunately since our Republican administrations decided to turn the
internet over to private business to run, you're (we're) stuck with
the innate conservatism of large business whenever a threat to
earnings looms however low on the horizon.

So this is all Bush's fault, too, eh?  Is there no end to the man's
malfeasance?  Too funny.

I am curious, though.  Who or what is it that you say is "run[ning]" the
Internet these days?  And how did the Republicans turn it over to
it/them, exactly?

Fact is, the man behind the push is NY AG Andrew Cuomo, who is not known
to be a big donor to Republican causes.

--
Jim Gysin
Waukesha, WI

In a not so nutshell:


1983 The switch to TCP/IP

On January 1st, ARPANET makes its official transition to TCP/IP. The
network can now branch anywhere, and network data transfer is a piece
of cake.

For security reasons, the Defense Communications Agency splits the
ARPANET into:

* MILNET for sites carrying military information
* ARPANET for the research community

The two networks are connected by a gateway, so users can't tell the
difference.

1983:1

1978: TCP/IP


1982: SMTP

1989: ARPANET retires
Esprit

Esprit (European Strategic Programme for Research and Information
Technology) is established by the EEC to coordinate the European
Information Technology industry. 1983:2

DNS proposal

Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris (ISI) and Craig Partridge (BBN) publish
two RFCs describing the Domain Name System (DNS) using tree-branching
structure and specific-to-general addressing. "Eventually, a committee
agreed on seven 'top-level' domains: edu, com, gov, mil, net, org and
int." They stand for:

* edu = university
* com = company
* gov= government
* mil = military
* org = non-profit organization
* net = network service provider
* int = international treaty entity

1983:3

1977: Standardising e-mail headers

1986: DNS summit
More than 70 CSNET sites are online. 1983:4
1980: 3-tier structure

1986: CSNET success
Fido BBS

Standard modem speed is 300 bps, slower than the average human reading
speed, and modems are still quite expensive ? around US$500. The BBS
is still an exclusive technical hobby.

Tom Jennings, a visitor of CBBS, creates Fido BBS. Flames are common,
but Jennings leaves it to users to deal with them. His philosophy:
"Thou shalt not offend; thou shalt not be easily offended." Fido has
been described as having a "street" atmosphere, and will later expand
into Fidonet.



=======================================

1986 Internet takes shape

Nearly all computer science departments and many private computer
research sites in the US are connected to CSNET. The CSNET success
parallels other networks:

* BITNET (Because It's Time Network), an IBM network open to all
* UUCP at Bell Labs for file transfer and remote execution
* USENET
* NASA's SPAN (Space Physics Analysis Network).

All these networks communicate with TCP/IP and as a result come to be
collectively called the Internet.

1986:1

(Presumabely, all these networks have gateways to the NSF backbone.)

1983: CSNET grows


1980: USENET


1985: NSF backbone
Internet around the globe

Other countries have their own networks too:

* Several academic service networks in Europe
* CDNet in Canada
* The JANET (Joint Academic Network) in the UK 1986:2

Eventually these networks build gateways to the US Internet, and the
Internet comes to mean the international network. National boundaries
begin to dissolve. 1986:3

1980s: Hundreds of networks

Early '90s: Network numbers
NSF takes over Internet

The NSF (National Science Foundation) takes over Internet
responsibilities from DARPA. 1986:4
1989: ARPANET retires
Super-conductors

IBM labs in Zurich discover high-temperature superconductors with
potential for superconducting computers in the future. 1986:5

1985: Transputer
DNS summit

Representatives from major networks meet on the West Coast for a grand
summit meeting, and agree to use DNS. 1986:6

1983: DNS proposal
Interop

Dan Lynch starts the Interop trade show to promote TCP/IP. It is
attended by hardcore networking people for the first couple of years.
1986:6
1989: Internet attracts business
Fidonet piggybacks on Internet

At around this time, Tim Pozar at SRI (Stanford Research Institute)
begins working on a scheme to distribute Fidonet e-mail globally over
the Internet. In other words, the Internet acts as a link between
Fidonet nodes in different parts of the world. Ken Harrington at SRI
provides administrative and finanial support. 1986:7

====================================

1985 Transputer

Inmos (UK) manufactures the transputer, a microprocessor with integral
memory designed for parallel processing.

Fibre-optics

In the US, fibre optics are first used to link mainframe computers.

1985:1

1972: fibre optic links

1986: Superconductors
Fidonet and Echomail

With the availabilty of affordable 1200 bps modems, it is no longer
prohibitively expensive to echo e-mails over long-distances late at
night when phone rates are lowest. Tom Jennings assigns each Fido BBS
with a unique node number, and Fido BBSes across America begin to
observe the "National Fido Hour" from 1 to 2 am nightly when the BBSes
call each other up to echo e-mails.

At around this time, the introduction of Echomail in Fidonet makes it
possible for conferences between many users, instead of simply one to
one.

Fidonet continues to grow.

1985:2

1984: Fidos proliferate

1986: Fidonet rides on Internet
NSF backbone

5 supercomputer centres are scattered throughout the US, and the NSF
agrees to build a backbone to link them together. NSF offers free
access to the backbone network (called NSFNET) if geographical regions
build for themselves community networks. As a result, community
networks begin to sprout, including:

* NYSERNET: New York State Educational Research Network
* CERFnet: California Educational Research Network (in honour of
Vint Cerf)

1985:3

Networks can now choose between connecting with ARPANET or NSFNET.
NSFNET soon becomes more popular as it is faster and easier to connect
with. 1985:4

==================================
1986 Internet takes shape

Nearly all computer science departments and many private computer
research sites in the US are connected to CSNET. The CSNET success
parallels other networks:

* BITNET (Because It's Time Network), an IBM network open to all
* UUCP at Bell Labs for file transfer and remote execution
* USENET
* NASA's SPAN (Space Physics Analysis Network).

All these networks communicate with TCP/IP and as a result come to be
collectively called the Internet.

==============================

1989 Internet draws business

Dan Lynch's Interop trade show attracts business people including
"Novell, Synoptics, and Network General". The Internet is starting to
appeal to the business world.

Its success provided an object lesson in technology and how it
advances. "Standards should be discovered, not decreed," said one
computer scientist in the TCP/IP faction.

1989:1

1986: The 1st Interop


1977: RFC 724
ARPANET retires

Mark Pullen, a program manager at DARPA, retires the ARPANET, since
the much faster NSFNET has taken over as the major backbone. ARPANET
is 20 years old. 1989:2

==============================
1991 E-commerce

The National Science Foundation (NSF) lifts restrictions against
commercial use of the Internet. Electronic commerce on the Net is now
possible. Some of the early founders of the Net bemoan this, while
others welcome it. 1991:1

============================

1993 The NSF announces that it will assign 3 major administrative
functions to private corporations. They are:

* Internet address registration ("thus acting as a gateway or
potential chokepoint for determining exactly which sites are granted
permission to join the high-speed network"), assigned to Network
Solutions.
* Directory and database services ("keeping track of how to locate
people and resources"), assigned to AT&T.
* Informational services provided to Net users ("modernization of
tools for making use of the Internet"), assigned to General Atomics.

http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/VID/jfk/timeline.htm

================================
================================


In 1987, as network traffic increased, the NSF commissioned IBM and
MCI to build a
new backbone, using TCP/IP protocols. Because the original ARPA
backbone was nearly
20 years old, it was decommissioned and the original ARPA Internet was
subsumed into
NSFNET. From that point on, it was no longer necessary to prefix
Internet with ARPA,
and NSFNET effectively became the Internet?a government owned network
for the US
academic and research community. Network effects now began to work
their magic, and
the number of hosts on the Internet increased exponentially as
academic-research
networks attached themselves (Table 3). The much reported growth of
the Internet is
based on figures such as those in Table 3, but it is important to
recognize that this
?growth? of the Internet did not represent new networking activity, so
much as a transfer
of allegiance. Certainly, because networks were growing rapidly, this
was not a zero-sum
game, but during the period 1985-1990 most Internet growth represented
the attachment
to the Internet of existing networks by the installation of new
software and protocols, not
new networking plant. Throughout the 1980s, the Internet was a US
Government-owned
entity and the NSF?s conditions of acceptable use forbade commercial
use. The next stage
in its development was the establishment of management structures and
privatization.
-----------
The NSF also spun off the first Internet Service Providers
(ISPs). In 1989, PSInet
was established by a former NSF contractor to provide Internet access
in the New York
Area; another NSF spin-off, Advanced Network Services, followed
shortly. Several other
regional operators commenced operation in the following months.
Because NSF policy
prohibited commercial use of the national backbone, in July 1991 a
consortium of three
ISPs established the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) by which they
carried one
another?s traffic on a mutual basis, enabling them to avoid using
NSFNET?s
infrastructure. Soon dozens of ISPs, both national and international,
had joined CIX.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=867087#PaperDownload

==============
++++++++++++++
==============

So could it have happened differently? I suppose so, but the
bottom line is that the "public" internet is anything but.

Well, it's certainly not a "private" Internet, either.

But what I was really questioning was your claim that "our Republican
administrations decided to turn the internet over to private business to
run."

I left the interesting and lengthy history that you supplied in place
instead of snipping it because I wanted anyone to be able to see that,
as it shows that to the extent that private business was put in charge
of "running" the Internet, that decision was made by the National
Science Foundation, not some Republican administration or two or ten.
Specifically, this is from what you just supplied:

1993 The NSF announces that it will assign 3 major administrative
functions to private corporations. They are:

* Internet address registration ("thus acting as a gateway or
potential chokepoint for determining exactly which sites are granted
permission to join the high-speed network"), assigned to Network
Solutions.
* Directory and database services ("keeping track of how to locate
people and resources"), assigned to AT&T.
* Informational services provided to Net users ("modernization of
tools for making use of the Internet"), assigned to General Atomics.

And note that none of that is content-related, so it's not relevant to
the current mess being generated by Cuomo. It's strictly
infrastructure, and not control. Cuomo, OTOH, is all about control.

It is a heterogeneous patchwork of private corporations, with the
emphasis on private. None of them, unlike say the electric company -
or the phone company - which has to provide you with a connection as
long as you pay the bill, none of the ISP's is under any legal
obligation to allow anyone access to their private network *AT ALL*.
They can set up whatever "AUP's" (acceptable use policy if you've
never looked at yours) they think the traffic will bear, and they are
under absolutely no legal obligation to connect you to the internet
*AT ALL*, and they're obviously free to decide what to put on their
own servers.

And someone else will pick up the slack and profit by it, as no one
"owns" the infrastructure. The various ISPs cannot control content from
elsewhere, and if they think otherwise, they're in for a rude awakening.
I've been hearing about the death of the Internet since I first plugged
in a modem almost 20 years, and whoever thinks that they "own" things
got zapped each time they got a little too big for their britches.

Now, they in fact have been granted 'common carrier' immunity to
content from OFF their network that a subscriber connects to so they
have little reason to bother most of the time and they don't (at least
not until and unless they get large numbers of users "bit torrenting"
them to death <to coin a verb>).

But as far as a legal *right* to access content such that you can
force an ISP to provide a connection to content?

No such thing. You're on their network on their terms at their
sufferance. Uncle Same has washed his hands of any connection with
your connection.

Like I said, someone else will pick up the slack if the big corporations
start trying to control their users' content, and Cuomo might actually
be doing us all a favor by encouraging the big corporations to get out
of the provider business, because maybe they just can't provide without
also wanting to control...

--
Jim Gysin
Waukesha, WI
.

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