connectivity issues

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

--------

Randall Hofland wrote:
| John Chambers wrote:
|
| >  But in the short term, we have the problem that the commercial guys
| > don't want you  to do  this.   This is potentially of such value that
| > we should be doing everything we can to make sure that ISPs allow it.
| >
| > We do have the problem that they are usually big, powerful companies,
| > and we don't have the clout.
| >
|
| Agreed, which is why becoming politically active (and aggressively active
| at that) is the only solution for now.

Yeah. And there are several instructive historical precedents. One is
the postal system itself. A major reason that most postal systems are
run by governments is that early commercial services  generally  only
served the profitable market, mostly in big cities.  The only way the
other 90% of the population could get mail service  was  by  lobbying
for  a  government  service that would deliver to the less-profitable
addresses.  Rural Free Delivery was a government project  to  provide
mail service to people who would never have gotten it any other way.

The Rural Electrification  project  in  the  1920's  and  1930's  was
another good example. Electricity came to the big cities quickly, but
would never have been available in  rural  areas  if  the  government
hadn't  stepped in and made it happen.  In this case, it was possible
for the government to get  away  with  regulating  the  corporations,
since  they  were  natural  monopolies that already had somewhat of a
history of cutting their competitors' wires. The monopolies had a bad
reputation to most people outside New York and Chicago.

The first half century of the phone system is also full of  cases  of
government regulators forcing the phone companies to provide services
that weren't profitable.   There  was  a  widespread  concensus  that
getting everyone connected was more important than any ideology.  The
first phone systems couldn't interconnect, and if you  had  a  phone,
you  could  only  call  other  subscribers  to the same company.  The
government stepped in, decreed standards, and forced the companies to
cooperate with each other. The government also required extending the
phone service to the countryside.

It's easy to get the feeling that the phone and cable  companies  are
being dragged kicking and screaming into the Internet age. Well, they
are no longer screaming too loudly.  Rather, they are fighting to get
control  of  this  popular  new  kind  of  TV,  but have no intention
whatsoever of complying with any silly design goals or usage  demands
of  a bunch of academic computer nerds.  They dismiss us the same way
the corporations dismissed the rural folks a century back.  We're not
worth their effort, any more than that gang of farmers and small-town
folks were worth the effort of the phone or electric companies.

This is exactly the situation where government regulators have  often
stepped  in,  to  ensure  that  a service is provided when commercial
interests aren't interested.  And recall who it  was  that  paid  for
creating  the  Internet in the first place.  It wasn't AT&T or AOL or
Microsoft. They are merely trying to take over ownership of something
that the government paid for and we computer nerds built.

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