dattier@jolnet.ORPK.IL.US (David W. Tamkin) (12/28/89)
In the last two weeks a posting has been going around BBS's to the effect that the FCC is attempting to surcharge data calls, virtually identically to what was under consideration in 1987 and early 1988. The original appears to have come from a Fidonet echo. When it first showed up on Usenet, someone rebutted that this was all a big mistake: some new modem owner had read a two-year-old file on a Fidonet node, ignored the posting date, flown into a rage over a dead issue, and started uploading a two-year-old file all over creation. All copies of this posting talk about "CompuServ" [sic] and instruct the reader to download a file named "MOBILIZE.ZIP" that never accompanies it. Nothing in it says how to get the MOBILIZE.ZIP file as straight text if your machine doesn't have un.ZIPping software. Since there is no indication of the syste from which it was downloaded to start, no one knows where to find MOBILIZE.ZIP at all. Most significantly, at first the panic post said nothing at all about our having gone through the exact same thing two years ago. Later editions have an extra paragraph at the beginning that seems to have been tacked on along the way: this prologue says that "two years ago they tried to do this to us" but nothing in the original text shows any acknowledgment or recollection of the previous go-round. I've been looking for a copy of that first rebuttal; I thought it was here in alt.bbs or comp.dcom.modems, but I have not been able to locate it, not even on Portal (which has a very generous expiration allowance). Would someone who saw that first rebuttal please mail it to me, or would the author step forward? NO, not the panic posting, the rebuttal. Please send a copy, as indicated in the Reply-To line, to 73307.133@compuserve.com as well. (That's the account of a friend on CompuServe who is also trying to get to the bottom of this.) I don't imagine anyone has actually checked with the FCC to see whether the tariff has really come up for reconsideration or not. -- David W. Tamkin dattier@jolnet.orpk.il.us ...!attctc!jolnet!dattier