[ih] A paper

[Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond]

On 18/07/2021 23:45, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
> Thanks (and Vint) for that injection of facts. I'd like to qualify one remark, though.
>
>> IMHO, NONE of the decisions made at the time were "political" in nature.
> It does slightly depend on where you were sitting though. Where I was sitting from
> early 1985 (the networking group at CERN) our main motivation was to get from a
> horribly diverse set of protocols to a standard set, and that pushed us very hard
> towards OSI, and that was our official policy. We changed that policy a few years
> later when it was clear that TCP/IP was much more widely supported by our
> vendors
> than OSI. That was all entirely pragmatic and technically based. However,
> there
> was tremendous pressure from two quarters against that choice, purely on political
> grounds: from European Commission officials and from the incumbent telecom carriers
> (i.e. the PTTs). Of course that wasn't anything to do with human rights impact,
> but only to do with defending European industrial interests against perceived
> US high-tech hegemony, and defending the incumbent telcos' monopolies. So
> it
> was also bound up with the general push towards telco deregulation. Another factor
> was the ITU (just down the road from CERN) defending its territory against the
> encroachment of the cheeky Internet upstarts.

There were two points of view in the early 90s. On the one hand, 
technical, the people actually using the computing resources had a 
choice between the ITU protocols on big mainframes that were cumbersome 
to use (try X.400 email addressing) and that necessitated hacks like 
Kermit to get files transferred across to their PCs. On the other, a 
multiplication of free software like KA9Q & other pc-based software 
allowed for a TCP-IP stack on a PC. Technically it wasn't even a choice. 
It seems to me the ITU protocols lost the battle, the moment personal 
computers became commonplace.
But politically in Europe, what you described above was *exactly* what 
was going on - even in the UK, when it was time to evolve JANET in the 
early 90s.
Kindest regards,

Olivier