The current AUP governing the NSF backbone to the Internet is reproduced elsewhere in this issue. The AUP requires that the research carried out via the net be open and available to others. Thus many benefit from the contributions of others. Also, a high level of automation is used which means that much labor is saved. The problems of automation can be broadcast widely so they can be examined and solved.
Posts are donated, e-mail is donated, programs are donated, standards work is donated.
This open communication is necessary to produce the high tech hardware and software that has been developed and nourished through Usenet News and the Internet. Unlike academic institutions functioning under the National Science Foundation's AUP, private companies feel no obligation to support their employees so they can contribute to Usenet or the Global Internet. Such companies may even set up internal Usenet groups, but hourly workers, at companies like Ford Motor Company, continue to be denied access internally and externally. Analyzing a similar situation that existed in the 1800s, John Kells Ingram, in A History of Political Economy, describes how one sector of the economy in Great Britain was held back and dependent upon the forward moving sector to advance it. The industry of the towns had to proceed that of the country, and the latter had developed mainly by the action of the former.