-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 11:33 AM 6/4/97 -6, Peter Trei wrote:
'Publically funded network backbones'? Can you name one (in the US)? NSFnet and ARPAnet are long dead. Back when they were active, there was considerable debate about the legality of commercial speech on the net, and earlier, doubts about the legality of any traffic (including private email) which was not in support of government funded research. (the first big mailing list, the SF-Lovers Digest, had a quasi-underground existence for many years due to this worry).
The Net is technically and legally a private value-added network. The last bit of the then existing backbone was privatized the weekend following the OKC bombing in April 1995. (No relation) DCF -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 5.0 beta Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM5Ym+4VO4r4sgSPhAQHglgP+PVwxuSuNzSJWNjZgaDtATi+p0pN5uCyp y9QDT6SQnFmkCn/cvIs0h6Kd++foqxR+pGAquSnqsKB5bMWRDxiyob9oqFiKkO9Z 8W0riSjP18GutnO2xrzozMO9K2mPbwYPHwHm2IAX31kebmr4zYpqu4exq8227jTP 4mHHXb9GlJE= =reP1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----