[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Usenet archives sold

[ronda@ais.org (Ronda Hauben)]

Felix Stalder <stalder@fis.utoronto.ca> writes:

>I really have a hard time with this discussion which seems about knee-jerk
>complaining. The fact is that for the last 5 years, Dejanews was the only
>one interested enough in Usenet as a whole to archive it. Without them,
>there would be no archive whatever.

To the contrary, Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto archived
much of early Usenet to 1990 (from 1981-1990)

He didn't do it for profit.


However the implications of all this are significant.

I have begun to look at Google. It seems that google grew out
of a research project at Stanford. And that there was probably
the kind of funding from the NSF and other US research organizations
for the research project.

However, instead of that kind of research funding going to 
support cooperative collaborative activity, or the creation
of some kind of public archives that will provide an measure
of a standard for the companies who do archiving, the funding
is going it seems instead to creation profit making companies.

And the researchers at Stanford are on the board of technical
advisors or on the board of directors or become the 
CEO's of these companies.

And Stanford U itself is listed as an investor in Google.

So what happens when the research community itself is being
privatized this way.

Stanford is providing the model for other universities in the US 
(and elsewhere around the world) to copy.

So there is no funding for basic research, there is no funding
to understand the social implications of what is being developed
and to have scientific direction to the development.

Instead we have the drifting of complex systems.

We have the private and proprietary concerns being supported by
public funding that should be going to support research to benefit
the public.

>Everyone who is now complaining about Dejanews selling their archive is
>really saying that they haven't cared enough to organize an archive
>themselves but think now, from the comfort of their home computer, that
>Dejanews/Google should not act as the businesses they always said they are
>but as a community service nobody was ever willing to put the work in.

I have lost the account where I did some of this archiving because
the university professor who had sponsored my account took a leave
of absence to go with his graduate students to form a startup to
commercialize their research.

There is an obligation by research institutions that they support
basic research and research for the public purposes, not that they
take that money and use it to support start start up private
corporations.

What is happening to the future and to the vision for the future
when there is such activity by research organizations?

What is the view of the world for graduate students when the
only goal offered them is to go and create a start up?

If the research funds were being used as is the mission obligation
of research institutions, then  there would be a community that
could and would be doing what is needed to support the continued
development of usenet and the internet.

Whether that would include an archive of Usenet posts the research
community could decide.

However the demoralization of the research community that this
privatization of research represents means that the drift sets
in and is lauded rather than that there is the needed steering
for these important new online developments like Usenet
and the Internet.


>Complaining now seems not only futile but also pretty ludicrous.

To the contrary it is critical to figure out what is going on
and what is behind all this and how to do something to set
these developments back on a track going forward.

Ronda
ronda@panix.com
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/
http://www.ais.org/~ronda
http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other




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