section of COOK Report Sept-Oct Double Issue Published announcement

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Preface to the Wolf Interview


In a nearly four hour one-on-one August 15 interview with the COOK
Report at the University of Pennsylvannia Steve Wolff announced a
significant reversal of NSF policy on commercial use of the the vBNS.
Wolff had stated in com-priv on December 29, 1993 that in the "new
NSFNET solicitation (NSF 93 - 52) (1) shared use of the vBNS by its
provider is explicitly allowed . . ."  Wolff was also qouted by Ellen
Messmer in Network World on February 21, 1994 as saying "there
will be no prohibition of commercial traffic on the vBNS," and "MCI
will get valuable experience selling this type of service to their
clientele."  On August 15, 1994 he told the COOK Report:  "The vBNS
will not have commercial use.  There will be a mesh of PVCs among
all five supercomputer centers and MCI doesn't have any right
unilaterally to place traffic on those PVCs."


We applaud the change of direction on Wolff's part which, as far as
we can tell, he announced to us for the first time.  When we asked
him whether this was not a significant reversal and cited these two
assertions, he said that he had meant on December 29 only to assert
the Boucher ammendment as giving the NSF grounds to make the
NAPs AUP free and added that he felt his statement to us was
consistent with what he had told Messmer in February.  When we
asked him by private email after the meeting whether he had
publicly stated the no commercial use policy before, he did not reply.
We asked a number of other sources via email and telephone
whether they had heard any prior policy statement that commercial
use would be disallowed.  While none said that they had, some said
that they were not surprised because the ATM technology involved
would make it easy to segment the super computer center use from
the rest of MCI's network.


All in all we believe that Wolff has laid to rest the earlier and
misguided policy of granting the provider of a government paid for
backbone commercial use of governmnet paid for facilities.  He also
disavowed what we believe was his earlier contention that he had
Congressional authority via the Boucher ammendment to continue to
do so.  We protested to GAO the vBNS award to MCI on the very
grounds that such grants of commercial use by government officials
exceded their legitimate authority.  While de jure the GAO turned us
down, de facto the NSF seems to be now prepared to implement the
more responsible policy that we had sought.  We congratulate them
for their decision.  We had been crtical of NSF precisely because it
had seemed to us that they refused to learn from the 1990 -1992
ANS controversies.  It seems now that learning is taking place.  For
this we are glad.


As a result of questions asked about his co-opting the telcos
statement we carried away from the meeting a better appreciation of
how Steve Wolff views the Internet and his role therein.


He said:  "Might telcos become dominant?  Of course there is such a
danger.  Be careful when you begin to dance with the elephants.  But
remember if they employ illegal means of increasing market share,
we have laws against anti-competitive behavior.  I doubt that they
would do something questionable and walk away unchallenged.


On the other hand if we draw them in now we have a chance of
influencing them. Until they understand the desire for
communication between users that motivated the CB radio fad and
the internet style and provide, it they cannot do anything that will
put the internet out of usiness.  But if the telcos do understand it,
their can use their muscle get it to more people more cheaply.  While
they are doing this they will also develop a common ground to
discuss what these services should be."


It seems to us that he allows the big industry, high tech, high
bandwidth, high cost view of the Internet to dominate his policy
making process.  To some the HPCC view of the Internet seems to
dictate an approach that only our largest corporations with their
economic muscle can handle.  We distrust this point of view for two
reasons.  One it ignores low cost lower tech ways that are extremely
cost effective in their ability to act on a broad scale as enabling
technologies both for the provision of internet service and the uses
that ordinary citizens can make of it.  Two by potentially putting the
internet and NII into the hands of a few giant corporations, it may
well smother the diversity that makes the net so useful to such a
broad range of people.


To sum up Wolff made it very clear that he has an academic and
research consituency to serve and that when you get right down to
the nitty gritty the NAPs are there to see that this community
maintains its connectivity in the absence of a single NSF funded
backbone.  If this shapes the entire net in such a way that some of its
grass roots users question, there is not much that Wolff, given his
constituency, can be expected to do about it.  All of which from our
editorial point of view calls into question the appropriateness of
having NSF design the architecture of the Internet for the rest of us.
But as Wolff correctly pointed out, without major lobbying in
Congress nothing is likely to happen that will shift this current
direction.


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