connectivity issues

[Janicki at ia-inc.com (Chris Janicki)]

Your analogies are flawed.  Receiving phone calls and snail mail are 
essentially an unlimited part of the service, but making calls 
(especially long distance) and sending mail cost a premium.  Are you 
suggesting that we protest to get free long distance calls too? 



>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

On 8/10/01, 10:48:51 PM, John Chambers <jc at trillian.mit.edu> wrote 
regarding Re: connectivity issues:


> --------

> Charles C. Bennett, Jr. suggests:
> | Cable companies are licenced by municipality.  Every couple of years
> | your local town board gets to make the cable company jump through
> | hoops to be allowed to continue to provide service to the locals.
> |
> | Guess what...  next time AT&T Cable's licence comes up for renewal in
> | Arlington, I'll be there with a bunch of other Arlington geeks to make
> | sure that unhindered internet service be a prerequisite for licence
> | renewal.
> |
> | Perhaps we can use Slashdot to make sure that this is done as a
> | concerted effort in municipalities everywhere.

> Good idea in general.  But we do need to learn how  to  explain  what
> it's all about in terms that the local regulators understand.

> One approach:  Would you buy phone service that only allowed outgoing
> calls? Imagine if you and all your friends were restricted like that.
> How useful would your phone  be?   Yeah,  you  could  make  calls  to
> commercial sites to order things.  That's about all.

> Similarly, how useful would snail mail be if you could  only  receive
> mail, and only big companies could send it out?

> This is the model that the cable companies are working from.   Saying
> "no  servers"  means you can't receive incoming connections.  This is
> violation of the whole design of the  Internet,  which  is  based  on
> point-to-point  messaging.  And it's no more acceptable than it would
> be for the phone or postal systems.

> The cable companies are basically TV services.  They think of the Net
> as a new kind of TV ("with a Buy button", as someone remarked).  They
> think the Internet was created back in  '92  to  run  browsers.   And
> browsers  were built to give you a better way to see commercial sites
> so you can buy things.

> The only real way to convince them otherwise is if we do  as  Charles
> suggests,  and try to bring pressure on them to deliver real Internet
> connectivity.  Otherwise, they'll keep trying to move to an  Internet
> in which only big commercial interests are allowed to "broadcast".

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