On Fri, 25 Oct 1996, Vadim Antonov wrote:

...

Europe heavily subsidizes the US Internet. It's not just VBCnet: the European Internet community pays something like 90% of the costs of traffic between Europe and North America. The same applies to the rest of the world.

Most of all Europe heavily subsidizes its own government bureaucracies.

So because Europeans are in the habit of subsidizing, they should subsidize the US Internet too? And have you really failed to notice that the US wastes hundreds of billions on bureaucrats?

In some places it's cheaper to drag a circuit to US and back than from one European country to another.

We did quite a bit of work checking rates between various European destinations some time ago. I know of no case where this is true. In general, connections to and through the Scandanavian countries are cheapest.

There are numerous licensing problems.

As everywhere.

Then, you forgot direct U.S. subsidies (like ICM program sponsored by NSF). Without ICM, the access costs for European (and elsewhere) countries would be quite a lot higher.

Can you document this? Or to put it another way, where is our share of these direct US subsidies?

Finally, the situation will change when backbone carriers will truely internationalize by expanding backbones beyond U.S., and when large European companies will expand business to U.S. (some do -- like BT

This is essentially the same as what I am saying. In time the situation will come into balance.

which gave MCI quite a chunk of money, which at least partially were used to build MCInet). Some my friends used to work for Cable & Wireless, which is moving into Internet business as well (in U.S.).

-- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015 http://www.uk.vbc.net VBCnet West +1 408 971 2682 fax +1 408 971 2684