[ih] Fw: Free Speech and ARPAnet?

[John Levine]

>I'm more with the viewpoint previously expressed, that the freebooting 
>nature of the Internet was imported more from Usenet than the ARPAnet.

I was never on the Arpanet (our department chair at Yale for some
reason didn't think it was interesting) but it was always my
impression that beyond the commercial restrictions of the AUP, nobody
was anonymous and it was generally understood that if you were unduly
annoying there would be repercussions.

Usenet, on the other hand, was an unfunded project that ran under the
radar for a long time.  Many (most?) of the servers were Unix systems
whose primary job was to do something else, and the substantial
telephone costs of the uucp transfers were mostly hidden in corporate
phone budgets, particularly the ones at Bell Labs.  There was also a
lot of friendly cooperation -- I spent one summer at our house at the
NJ shore, brought my server with me, carefully looked at the phone
rates and found that the node at the FAA's test center was a free
local call even though it was over 30 miles away, and the guy who ran
it kindly gave me a login to use for uucp and usenet.

Given the sketchiness of the setup, we all (or nearly all) understood
that if we were annoying we were likely to lose our connections, but
given the much lower overall visibility, the discussions were pretty
unfettered.

R's,
John