this formulation does not take into account the transfer of responsibility and authority for policy increasingly to NSF and to the so-called Federal Networking Council after about 1988. NSF's role increased substantially with the creation of the NSFNET.
In any case the principal point is that the USG has deliberately relaxed its control over policy as the Internet has become increasingly commercialzed and internationalized. Vint At 11:21 PM 1/23/2002 -0800, Ed Gerck wrote: >ARPA. > >Control was injected into the original ARPANET by the ARPA >Contracts, which controlled all users and uses of the initial >ARPANET and the Early Internet. The Appropriate Use Rules >dissolved slowly between 1986 an 1995. Thus, one of the ARPA >roles was to instill trust by holding the power to remove badly >behaving users. Very few were removed, but in the early days, >everyone knew that had better behave, or else... > >However, when the Appropriate Use Rules dissolved slowly >between 1986 an 1995, it seems that the denizens of the Net did >not become aware of the loss of trust until it was truly gone (now!)... >and now they wonder where it went, or if it ever existed, cause >they did not see it going away;-)... > >Stef has an interesting chronology of these events, in terms >of the paradigm shifts that hit the Net as it developed. I am >indebted to his clear formulation (some of which I repeated >above) as well as to his Frog analogy. What has happened, >is that as the ARPA controls slowly dissolved with the >evolution of the Internet, it has had the effect of Boiling The >Frog, where-in the Frog does not notice that anything is >happening until now it is too late for the Frog to do anything >about it. >
