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########## ########## ########## | RAPID GROWTH OF ONLINE SERVICES
########## ########## ########## | ONE BBSCON /EFF LIBRARY/ USENET
#### #### #### |
######## ######## ######## | JOHN PERRY BARLOW ON
######## ######## ######## | THE NSA, THE FBI, ENCRYPTION,
#### #### #### | AND WIRE-TAPPING
########## #### #### |
########## #### #### | THE TAO TE CHIP
=====================================================================
EFFector Online JULY 29, 1992 Issue 3.1 / Part 1
A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
ISSN 1062-9424
=====================================================================
ONLINE SERVICES EXPERIENCE SOLID GROWTH OVER PAST 5 YEARS
WITH MORE FORECAST FOR THE NEAR FUTURE
A new study released by SIMBA Information, a research group based in
Wilton, Connecticut, says sales by online services increased by 61.1
percent in the last five years. The trend will continue over the next five
years, says SIMBA, with a projected increase of 48%.
By 1996, the online information market should be worth about $14.2 billion
annually. Business uses will consume the lion's share of this market by a
factor of 24 to 1. Regardless of this, the services used by consumers were
the fastest growing segment of the market in the 1990-1991 period. This
growth in consumer use is expected to increase by 145 percent over the next
five years.
The report, "Online Services: 1992 Review, Trends, and Forecast" was
written for SIMBA by analyst Chris Elwell.
Other items in the report of interest: Subscribers to online services
numbered 5.4 million at the end of 1991, an increase of 18% over 1990.
Leading online services (CompuServe, Genie, Prodigy, etc.) reported an
aggregate sales growth of nearly 7% in 1991 from 1990 levels.
Some of the more notable conclusions of this report are:
#North American-based online services account for 57% of
worldwide sales,with rapid growth in the near term.
#More than half of the growth in online subscribers in 1991
was accounted for by Prodigy.
#One out of every five home computers has a modem.
#As the Regional Bell companies enter the online services
arena, the initial focal point of their efforts will be
online directory publishing.
#Even though the report gives detailed profiles of 35 major
players, it notes that most online services and database
publishers are relatively small operations.
-==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-
EFF to Crash The ONE BBSCON
August 13-16, Stouffer Concourse Hotel, Denver Colorado.
The ONE BBSCON is the major BBS conference of the year, hosting seminars in
such topics as How to make your BBS profitable; What is Internet?; FidoNet,
RelayNet, INet, et. al.; Graphics over a Modem; Learn from the Winners; as
well hosting an exhibition attended by vendors of BBS-related products.
And EFF will be there with a booth as well. We'll be doing the usual
booth-related activities such as handing out literature and selling
t-shirts; however, we're more interested in talking with the members of the
BBS community and learning what it needs from EFF. Along with seminars on
BBSs and the Law, EFF staff counsel Shari Steele will be presenting a talk
on the EFF at which we will be looking for feedback. If you'll be
attending, do stop by either the booth or the seminar and tell us what you
think.
For more information on ONE BBSCON, contact
ONE, Inc.
4255 S. Buckley Road
Suite 308
Aurora, Colorado 80013
(303)693-5252
Note: There is no email address. Leaves room for improvement.
-==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-
UPDATE ON THE EFF LIBRARY
The EFF Library was set up over a year ago when it became clear that,
regardless of the digital revolution, we were being overwhelmed by a wave
of hard copy. At that time, we had a backlog of around 1,000 documents,
books and magazines concerning issues relevant to the Electronic Frontier.
We engaged a professional librarian, Hae Young Wang, to bring order to
chaos, and to provide us with a method that would enable us to file and
retrieve material necessary to the work of the foundation.
Today, the EFF library in Cambridge houses over 2,300 items. The holdings
cover journal articles, newspaper articles, conference proceedings, court
documents, legislation, magazines, books, and brochures. The subject areas
include such things as information infrastructure, computers and civil
liberties, intellectual property and copyrights, and EFF archives.
The Library also maintains over 130 subscriptions to magazines and
newsletters.
In addition, the EFF library maintains, classifies and indexes EFF's
anonymous ftp archive files. These files, which are accessible to everyone
with Internet access, have recently been re-organized into what we hope is a
more user-friendly and informative manner. In the EFF ftp directory, you
can find documents about the EFF, back issues of its online newsletter,
notes on eff-issues, historical items, legal issues, current legislation,
local chapters, and a host of other material germane to the Electronic
Frontier.
While the ftp files are open to all, the EFF Library can now serve only the
staff here and in Washington. We hope to be able to provide service to EFF
members and the general public in the future, as funding and staffing
allow.
In the meantime, we have recently acquired new scanning software which we
hope will reduce the work involved in moving hard-copy information into
digital form. With this in place we will be adding items to the anonymous
ftp archive at an increased rate throughout the rest of the summer.
Recent additions to the EFF ftp files are:
The EFF Open Platform Proposal. This is the full text of the
EFF's plan to create a national public network through the
deployment of ISDN technology.
(pub/EFF/papers/open-platform-proposal)
Howard Rhinegold's "A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community".
This meditation on what it means to be online in 1992 was
first serialized in EFFector Online.
(pub/EFF/papers/cyber/life-in-virtual-community)
Senator Al Gore's High-Tech Bill (S.2937) as introduced on July
1, 1992. This bill provides funding to both NSF and NASA to
develop technology for "digital libraries", huge data bases
that store text, imagery, video, and sound and are accessible
over computer networks like NSFNET. The bill also funds
development of prototype "digital libraries" around the
country. This is the full-text of this bill along with the
press release from Gore's office announcing the bill.
(pub/EFF/legislation/gore-bill-1992)
An information packet on the GPO/WINDO legislation before congress
as S.2813/H.R. 2772. This discusses the function of the proposed
"gateway" for online public access to government databases. From
the Taxpayers Assets Project.
(pub/EFF/legislation/gpo-windo-info)
These files are also available through WAIS as eff-documents.src. WAIS
clients are available for the Mac, PC, NeXT, X11, and GNU Emacs
environments via anonymous ftp from think.com. A "guest" WAIS client is
available by telnetting to quake.think.com and logging in as 'wais'.
To retrieve these files via email, send mail to archive-server@eff.org,
containing (in the body of the message) the command
send eff <path from pub/EFF>
So to get the Gore bill, you would send
send eff legislati