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Newsgroups: comp.internet.library
From: jamesd@techbook.com (James Deibele)
Subject: Re: A question on Internet Resources
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1992 06:23:28 GMT

takefuji@donald.EEAP.CWRU.Edu (Yoshiyasu Takefuji) writes:

>    >>>>> Why are most Internet resources provided free? <<<<<

(1) There's no mechanism for charging --- yet.  If you're really
interested in this, you might try subscribing to the mailing lists
devoted to the commercialization and privatization of the Internet.
There's been discussion of how to set up such a mechanism, but there's
not an "Internet Gold Card" yet and taking Visa or MasterCard has its
own problems.

But many of the new internet utilities like WAIS and Gopher are 
beginning to show a charge field, even though the charge field is set to
0.00 ... so far.

(2) User interfaces are awful.  I've spent some time fishing around with
telnet, ftp, and even gopher and I'd be very reluctant to pay money for
most resources out there.  Gopher can do a pretty good job if the people 
on the "backside" do some work.  Without any compensation, not even
recognition (it's hard to know who's done the work with most resources),
it's hard to justify spending the time necessary to massage data into
proper shape.

ftp shows you only as much as the "ls" command will tell you, so you
have to transfer something to find out what it is.  wuarchive.wustl.edu
or UUNET have multi-megabyte lists of what they have, but it's pretty
much just filename, size, and date.  And on a smaller scale, this is
pretty much true of all the other ftp sites.

For modem or ASCII terminal users, WAIS and WWW are terribly confusing.

(3) The restrictions on commercial use of the internet discourage people
from providing commercial resources.  But the wall is gradually being
chipped away.  misc.jobs.offered is becoming more and more a place where
recruiting firms and personnel offices post ads.  In the past, it'd been
primarily the engineer who'd be working across the hall from the
new-hire who'd been posting these ads.  Some people still do, but I'd be
interested to see how the proportion of financially interested people
(recruiters on commission or personnel people doing their jobs) has 
increased in the past few years.

I think that there'll be a real incentive to provide certain resources
for free, because people will use them to order.  A record store that
had an extensive database of CDs available online would get a lot of
orders from people if they could say "now that you've found XYZ, why
don't you go ahead and order it by hitting "O" and then giving us your
credit card number."

Some resources will be exotic enough, complicated enough, or have enough
"pull" that people will be happy (or resigned) to pay for them.
Whatever the charges, it's usually less than going to the library and/or
typing it in by hand.

I can understand the limitations of the Acceptable Use Policy, and to a
large degree I think they're fair: if I'm using college facilities to
conduct a business, then to some degree the college is subsidizing me,
even if nobody else would be using that phone line or those bits on the
hard disk.  And it's not right that my business use deprives someone who 
needs them.  But most colleges or companies will allow use of the phone
to call Mom --- if you pay for it.  You can use the photocopier down the
hall to make copies of your novel --- if you pay for it.

The AUP needs to be pushed down to institutional level.  If Jo Blow
can't use her computer for her outside work at Old U., she may decide to
take that job at Miskatonic.  Let the institution decide what they'll do
with their bandwidth.  Let the NSF people concentrate on making sure
there's enough bandwidth. 

--
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