> >I certainly find it hard to justify allowing NSI to retain its unfair
> >advantage on the basis that after a great deal of investment and work, a
> >big competitor may possibly, maybe arise.
>
> Unfair? It was NSI's risk, investment, and entrepreneurship
What risk -- NSI had a cost+fee contract. That means zero risk,
guaranteed income.
NSI didn't request a change the payment formula until it was obvious to
everyone that they would obtain a monopoly on a revenue stream the size of
the Mississippi.
What investment -- NSI had a cost+fee contract. What you call investment
I call costs, for which they obtained full reimbursed by the government.
Moreover, some of those costs were for long term items -- like real
estate, which would have significant value long after NSI's contract
ended. Sure, to the extent that those costs weren't covered, NSI can keep
its land and offices.
NSI didn't spend any substantial sums until Amendment #4, which one should
remember was done at NSI's reuqest, when it was obvious that NSI would
obtain the monopoly on what was then the Internet's biggest money river.
What entrapreneurship? -- I know real many entrapreaneaurs. NSI is not
among them. NSI was just a aerospace-like, beltway bandit that happened
to find a government agency willing to pay them $10,000 for a toilet seat.
> When the various NSFNet cooperative agreements were terminated,
> I didn't see MCI-IBM, Sprint, and the regionals (now largely
> Verio), give up their networks, addresses, intellectual property
> and customer bases in a spirit of largesse emanating from the
> "unfairness" of their market segments. They walked with billions
> in assets and revenue streams.
Perhaps someone should look into their contracts, perhaps NSF was even
more remiss than we know.
The NSI cooperative agreement/contract specifically contains language
indicating that NSI's role was of limited duration and simply to perform
administrative functions.
There is nothing in the contract/cooperative agreement which encompasses a
transfer of control over the root and main tld zones to NSI.
NSI took advantage of extraordinarily lax government oversight.
That doesn't make 'em into great entrapreaneaurs.
> Maybe we want to list all the several thousand companies and
> institutions that received NSF awards and agreements, figure
> out what that's worth, and ex post facto divvy up their assets
> in a grand spirit of fairness.
I would suggest that most of those contracts were for things other than
the purely administrative duties which NSF offered, which NSI bid on, and
which NSF and NSI agreed upon.
NSI did nothing more than does a janitor -- and just like the janitor,
when NSI needed a new broom, the cooperative agreement said that the
government would pay for it.
I know people who have done research under government grants. In fact
I've done some myself. And those agreement specifically state what is to
happen to the results - typically there is an explicit license to the
government.
In other words, the government knows fully how to write a contract to
grant rights.
The fact that NSF, an agency skilled in writing such contracts, chose to
write the terms as requiring merely administrative duties, as establishing
performance standards for those duties (one usually doesn't dictate
standards to one to whom one is transferring ownership), and has express
terms regarding the sucessor to those duties is all clearly indicative of
the fact that the cooperative agreement is not a vehicle for the transfer
of anything but money from the government to NSI in return for the
performance of some fairly routine administrative chores.
--karl--
