Pardons requested from those who rightly try to keep Cypherpunks focused. If any of you can think of ways to get this message out and about, you'd be doing a Good Thing: without bandwidth, privacy means a lot less.
------- Forwarded Message------- Date: Tue, 19 Dec 1995 15:55:49 +0100 (MET) From: Marta Dubrzynska <martad@pap.waw.pl> To: Marjan Kokot <marjan@kud-fp.si> Subject: Polish internet
Dear Netpersonality,
This is a request for help on behalf of the Polish internet. We have one single internet provider in Poland: NASK. NASK has bacause of an agreement with the Polish Telecom a monopoly on lines connecting Poland with the rest of the world. University's schools and commercial internet providers have to get their acces from NASK. Prizes of internet are high. A complete account with SLIP etc. costs around 60 $ a month. Telephone costs are 3.7 $ per hour. If you take into account that wages of around 350 $ per month are considdered normal it is clear why internet is not used by so many people in Poland. And now NASK announced that too many people are using the internet and that they need more money to keep the lines open. They decided that from January they would raise the prizes, and that they would calculate costs per bytes sent or recieved. Yes that's right, we have to pay for letters you send us and we have to pay for WWW pages you download from us. This will mean the end of most internet activity in Poland. If you want to know the details you can find them at: http://galaxy.uci.agh.edu.pl/~szymon/protest-eng.html http://www.put.poznan.pl/hypertext/isoc-pl/battle.html protest@uci.agh.edu.pl
That's why we Marta Dubrzynska, Webmaster of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, (http://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/culture/csw/) and Michiel van der Haagen, Net user (http://www.atm.com.pl/COM/michiel/) ask your help. Can you make it clear to our Government and NASK that this policy is disasterous for Polish culture, economy and education? Please check out these WWW adresses and react.