On Tue, 8 Oct 1996, Tersian wrote:
Would this be such a Bad Thing(tm)? Many times I have seen research professors and students in the research field getting extremely upset because data that they used to exchange with other schools and countries is now taking 20 times longer because Joe Blow from L.A. is checking out all his favorite sports stories 300 times a day and John Dough is downloading all the porn he can fit on his 5 gig drive from across the country.
I wouldn't really see this move as a "Internet Separatist" movement, more as a "return to normalcy" in the true spirit of the Internet. Consider if you were a biochemical research student at biochem.edu and you wanted to transfer a 30Meg molecular model back and forth between biochem.edu and chem.edu but in between both of you were hundreds and thousands of hosts, using Internet resources for commercial and entertainment purposes. Wouldn't you be a little upset when your ftp was finished at .098K/s over a multi-homed DS3?
This argument is, if you will pardon the phrase, utter and complete bullshit. Before those annoying Joe Schmoe's threw their six-pack-guts up to the rail and started paying for their access, universities usually had what level of access to the net? 56k? Maybe T1? All feeding onto what, a T1 backbone? Commercialization of the network has brought a flood of resources to building out the backbones and making access cheaper for everyone, including the universities. You can't argue that congestion was not a problem before '94, because it was. You can't argue that the transatlantic links weren't always choking before '94, because they were. Commercialization of the 'net has made the vBNS, Internet II, etc., possible at OC-(whatever). Commercialization has pushed development of router, modem, Unix, IP software, etc., technology far faster than the universities ever could have pushed it. This elitish bullshit makes me want to puke. Pull your head out of your ass; it smells much better out here in the real world. __ Todd Graham Lewis Linux! Core Engineering Mindspring Enterprises tlewis@mindspring.com (800) 719 4664, x2804