Polish telco policy change

[Anonymous]

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 at pap.waw.pl>
>To:            Marjan Kokot <marjan at 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 at 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.