🚀 go-pugleaf

fit106@its.csiro.au (Kent Fitch) writes:

>I was told the other day that the growth in the "commercial" use of Internet
>in the USA is outstripping the growth of traditional users such as education/
>research organizations.  Is this true?  If so, how is it being managed, and 
>are similar things happening in Australia?

It is quite reasonable to expect that business growth in use of the
Internet is exceeding that in the education sector given that Universities
and generally only research departments started out on ARPANet.  As for
which is growing the quickest, a good gauge of this growth would be to
take a look at the growth in size of root domains (the last one had some
root domains record 200% growth over the period (3 months  I think),
Australia (.au) grew 94%).  For commercial users, America has providers
besides the government backed NSFNet, namely CIX and AlterNet.  ANS is
also part of this group and they (with a lot of monetry help from IBM)
provide the NSF backbone but with a tighter AUP.  I know of no alternative
to AARNet in terms of a country wide provider doing IP networking in
Australia.  Blah, I hope I got all that right, but as Geoff suggested,
if you're interested in the efforts behind comercialization of the Internet
and the problems/debates/flame wars associated with that, join com-priv.

Currently, I imagine that management is pretty much still centred around
"the NIC", from domain name allocation to network numbers.  Whether any
of the allocation of network numbers can be (or is) given to the
providers if CIDR comes in soon is yet to be seen.  Certainly with IPv7
network numbers will come from your provider rather than "the NIC".
How things work with registering under a domain not directly controlled
by "the NIC" (such as .au which kre looks after) I'm not sure of.

Re com-priv, if there are enough people on this locally to Australia,
would someone consider setting up an exloder for it ?  It is a list with
a fairly high volume.

Darren

say NO! to politicians and their ridiculous policies and vote INFORMAL!