Have we been played with this here Internet. I was aware of the theft of the patents on the social media from Leader, but I really did not have an accurate picture of the beginnings of the Internet until I read the chapter on Utopia and Privatization. To say the American people got screwed is the understatement of my life. We paid for the whole infrastructure, and Washington gave away to people of their choosing. These folks are the people behind the last election. The hippy's kids have sold us into tyranny, how ironic. Tell you what folks, we have been looking at the Internet in the wrong way...and that is not wise considering what the early corporate scum thought it to be. that 96 law that slick Willy passed created the digital enslavement by the very folks the Internet was supposed to slay and level the field...

...The privatization of the Internet—its transformation from a military network to the privatized telecommunications system we use today—is a convoluted story. Wade in deep enough and you find yourself in a swamp of three-letter federal agencies, network protocol acronyms, government initiatives, and congressional hearings filled with technical jargon and mind-numbing details. But on a fundamental level, it was all very simple: after two decades of lavish funding and research and development inside the Pentagon system, the Internet was transformed into a consumer profit center. Businesses wanted a cut, and a small crew of government managers were all too happy to oblige. To do that, with public funds the federal government created a dozen network providers out of thin air and then spun them off to the private sector, building companies that in the space of a decade would become integral parts of the media and telecommunications conglomerates we all know and use today—Verizon, Time-Warner, AT&T, Comcast. But how did it happen exactly? Unravelling the tale requires looking at the first privatized NSFNET provider: a consortium led by IBM and MCI. 52 [oh good,we are heading down that hole, we know already its convoluted and done with our money DC]

The National Science Foundation functioned on an educational mandate and could support only initiatives that had an education dimension. Legally, NSFNET contractors were not allowed to route their commercial traffic through the government-funded network. These terms were baked into the federal agency’s “Acceptable Use Policy” contract, and they were quite clear. How could the network be privatized if it couldn’t route commercial traffic? Later, the NSF managers claimed that NSFNET providers didn’t violate these terms and that they routed commercial traffic through separate, privately built network infrastructure. But a backroom deal the NSF made with its backbone operator shows that the truth is a bit murkier.

In 1990, the MCI-IBM consortium, with approval from NSF, split into two corporate entities: a nonprofit called Advanced Network Services and a for-profit confusingly named ANS CO+RE Systems. Advanced Network Services—ANS—continued to contract with the NSF to maintain and run the physical NSFNET backbone. Meanwhile, its for-profit division, ANS CO+RE, sold commercial network services to business clients on a new network it called the ANSNET. 53 Of course, this new ANSNET ran on the exact same physical network infrastructure that powered the NSFNET. Legally, though, the two— NSFNET and ANSNET—were treated as completely separate entities by the National Science Foundation, which meant that despite the Acceptable Use Policy that forbade commercial traffic on the NSFNET, the IBM-MCI consortium had a green light to do just that for profit. 54 It was a clever maneuver. On a basic level, it allowed the MCI-IBM consortium to double book the same asset, pocketing government money to run the NSFNET and then selling this same network to commercial clients. More fundamentally, it allowed a corporate entity with a direct stake in the business of computer networking to privatize a government asset without doing so explicitly. That’s exactly how executives at MCI-IBM’s newly formed ANS division saw it: “[We] have privatized the NSFNET,” the president of ANS bragged at a networking industry workshop at Harvard in 1990. 55

This public-private flip was not announced to the public, and it was also hidden from other NSFNET providers. When they finally discovered the existence of this sly deal a year later, they raised alarm and accused the agency of privatizing the network to a favored corporate insider. Some called for a congressional investigation into what they saw as mismanagement and possibly fraud. “It’s like taking a Federal park and giving it to K Mart. It’s not right,” a manager of a large NSFNET provider told the New York Times. 56 https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/03/part-2-surveillance-valley-secret.html