🚀 go-pugleaf

Kent Fitch (fit106@its.csiro.au) wrote:
: 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?  

Yes, it very likely that there are now significantly more "commercial" nodes
reachable (directly or indirectly) than "academic" nodes (the current counts
show that it's roughly 50-50, however this doesn't take in to account that
most machines on corporate networks do not show up in the DNS).

: What is the view of the Internet/AARNet custodians to this trend - encouragement
: or fear & loathing?  Will traffic charges be introduced based on "type" of
: user?

The only people that have problems with this (fear & loathing) are people
that are feeding off tax payers money and are seeing their arguments
for subsidies vanishing (this is a remark that explicitly does not apply
to Australia, which currently is a special case).

: What is happening in other areas such as Europe, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan?

I don't very know much about the later three, but in Europe the situation
is practically the same as in the States (expect that even more politics
are involved).

Naturally we (EUnet) are very interested in what's going on in Australia
and we would hope that we see commercial service providers emerge that
will be viable as partners for us. (Besides the business aspect, it would
be an good excuse to visit my home country the first time since 33 years
:-)).

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