Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!ucbvax!ENCORE.COM!bzs
From: bzs@ENCORE.COM (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Revolutions and Fidonet
Message-ID: <8811171648.AA12727@multimax.encore.com>
Date: 17 Nov 88 16:48:06 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 31


From: secd.cs.umd.edu!anderson@mimsy.umd.edu  (Gary Anderson)
>Is it reasonable to use revenues collected from 
>poor families who have no
>computers in order to finance a computer network 
>for relatively well off academics and business persons?
>
>How can we address the redistributional aspects of providing this
>important public good?

The product currently being "redistributed" is not the network, the
network is a vehicle for education and research. It's the result of
that education and research which are supposed to be redistributed. We
buy test tubes for laboratories but don't wring our hands that the
poor aren't getting their fair share of test tubes, no?

And, as things develop, there are plenty of direct applications of
such networking for everyone (eg. public schools and libraries.) I
don't think it takes a lot of imagination to see how the sharing of
information can be democratized. As volume goes up price should come
down, it doesn't take much to get on a network (in theory) if you
really want to, it could be done with leased equipment for $50 or so
per month today, if you really can't afford that then it's probably
the least of your problems. It's mainly the capacities and services
which need to be developed.

Read Stu Levy's book "Hackers" and the story about Lee Felsenstein who
put a terminal in a public mall area for anyone to leave messages on,
interesting experiment.

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||