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geoff@fernwood.mpk.ca.us
lederberg@ROCKY2.ROCKEFELLER.EDU
Final version of Networks considered harmful.
This is more-or-less accepted for publication late this year in CACM.
Many thanks to everyone who commented.  Some of the comments
have been incorporated.
NETWORKS CONSIDERED HARMFUL - FOR ELECTRONIC MAIL

	Electronic mail (email), using ARPANET and other networks has
been in use for almost 20 years.  The widespread use of telefax
is more recent.  However, unless email is freed from
dependence on the networks, I predict it will be supplanted by
telefax for most uses in spite of its many advantages over
telefax.  These advantages include the fact that
information is transmitted more cheaply as character streams than
as images.  Multiple addressees are readily accommodated.
Moreover, messages transmitted as character streams can be readily
filed, searched, edited and used by computer programs.

	The reason why telefax will supplant email unless email
is separated from special networks is that telefax works by using
the existing telephone network directly.  To become a telefax
user, it is only necessary to buy a telefax machine for a price
between $1,000 and $5,000 (depending on features) and to
publicize one's fax number on stationery, on business cards and
in telephone directories.  Once this is done anyone in the world
can communicate with you.  No complicated network addresses and
no politics to determine who is eligible to be on what network.
Telefax is already much more widely used than email, and a
Japanese industry estimate is that 5 percent of homes will have
telefax by 1995 and 50 percent by 2010.  This is with a $200
target price.

	Email could work the same way at similar costs, but
because of a mistake by DARPA about 1970, i.e. making a
special-purpose, special-politics network the main vehicle for
electronic mail, it was combined with other network uses that
require higher bandwith and packet switching.

	Another mistake was UUCP.  It uses the telephone network,
but three features inherited from its use within Bell Telephone
Laboratories made its widespread adoption a blunder.

	1. It assumes that both parties are using the UNIX
operating system rather than using a general mail protocol.  This
is only moderately serious, because some other systems have been
able to pretend to be UNIX sufficiently well to implement the
protocols.

	2. It requires that the message forwarding computer have
login privileges on the receiver.  This has resulted in a system
of relaying messages that involves gateways, polling and
complicated addresses.  This results in politics in getting
connected to the gateways and causes addresses often to fail.

	3. Today forwarding is often a service provided free
and therefore of limited expandibility.

	There has been a proliferation of networks and message
services on a variety of time-sharing utilities.  Some of them
are commercial and some of them serve various scientific
disciplines and commercial activities.  The connections between
these networks require politics and often fail.  When both
commercial and noncommercial networks must interact there are
complications with charging.  A whole industry is founded on the
technologically unsound ideas of competitive special purpose
networks and storage of mail on mail computers.  It is as though
there were dozens of special purpose telephone networks and no
general network.

	The solution is to go to a system that resembles fax in that
the ``net addresses'' are just telephone numbers.  The simple form
of the command is just

MAIL <addressee>@<telephone number>,

after which the user engages in the usual dialog with the mail system.

	The sending machine dials the receiving machine just as is
done with fax.  When the receiving machine answers, the sender
announces that it has a message for <addressee>.  Implementing
this can involve either implementation of protocols in a user machine or a
special machine that pretends to be a user of the receiving machine or
local area network.  The former involves less hardware, but the latter
involves less modification to the operating system of the receiving
machine.

	I have heard various arguments as to why integrating
electronic mail with other network services is the right idea.  I
could argue the point theoretically, but it seems better to
simply point out that telefax, which originated more recently
than electronic mail is already far more widespread outside
the computer science community.  Indeed it
is often used for communicating with someone who is thought to
have an email address when getting the forwarding connections
right seems too complicated.

The World of the Future

	Eventually, there will be optical fiber to every home or
office supplied by the telephone companies.  The same transmission
facilities will serve telephone, picturephone, telefax, electronic
mail, telnet, file transfer, computer utilities, access to the Library of
Congress, the ``National Jukebox'' and maybe even a national
video jukebox.  In the meantime, different services require
different communication rates and can afford different costs
to get them.  However, current telephone rates transmit substantial
messages coast-to-coast for less than the price of a stamp.  Indeed
the success of telefax, not to speak of Federal Express, shows that
people are willing to pay even higher costs.

What about the next 20 years of email?

	There are two kinds of problems, technical and political.
Guess which is easier.

	The main technical requirement is the development of a
set of point-to-point telephone mail protocols.  Any of several
existing network mail protocols could be adapted for the purpose.
Presumably the same kinds of modems and dialers that are used for fax would
be appropriate but would give better transmission speeds.

	Perhaps the organizationally simplest solution would be
to get one or more of the various UNIX consortia to add a direct
mail telephone protocol to UUCP.  Such a protocol would allow
mail to be addressed to a user-id at a telephone number.  The
computer would require a dialer and a modem with whatever
characteristics were taken as standard and it would be well to
use the same standards as have been adopted for telefax.  It
mustn't require pre-arrangement between the sending and receiving
computers, and therefore cannot involve any kind of login.
Non-UNIX systems would then imitate the protocol.

	Fax has another advantage that needs to be matched and
can be overmatched.  Since fax transmits images, fully formatted
documents can be transmitted.  However, this loses the ability to
edit the document.  This can be beaten by email, provided there
arises a widely used standard for representing documents that
preserves editability.

	The political problem is more difficult, because
there are enormous vested interests in the present lack of system.
There are the rival electronic mail companies.  There are the
organizers of the various non-profit networks.  There are the
engineers developing protocols for the various networks.
I've talked to a few of them, and intellectual arguments have
remarkably little effect.  The usual reply is, ``Don't bother
me, kid, I'm busy.''

	It would be good if the ACM were to set up a committee
to adopt a telephone electronic mail standard.  However, I fear
the vested interests would be too strong, and the idea would
die from being loaded with requirements for features that
would be too expensive to realize in the near future.

	Fortunately, there is free enterprise.
Therefore, the most likely way of getting direct
electronic mail is for some company to offer a piece of hardware
as an electronic mail terminal including the facilities for
connecting to the current variety of local area networks (LANs).
The most likely way for this to be accomplished is for the makers
of fax machines to offer ASCII service as well.  This will
obviate the growing practice of some users of fax of printing out
their messages in an OCR font, transmitting them by fax,
whereupon the receiver scans them with an OCR scanner to get them
back into computer form.

	This is probably how the world will have to get rid of
the substantially useless and actually harmful mail network industry.

	More generally, suppose the same need can be met either
by buying a product or subscribing to a service.  If the costs
are at all close, the people who sell the product win out
over those selling the service.  Why this is so I leave to psychologists,
and experts in marketing, but I suppose it has to do with
the fact that selling services requires continual selling to
keep the customers, and this keeps the prices high.

	I hope my pessimism about institutions is unwarranted,
but I remember a quotation from John von Neumann to some effect
like expecting institutions to behave rationally is like
expecting heat to flow from a cold place to a hot place.

	I must confess that I don't understand the relation
between this proposal and the various electronic communication
standards that have been adopted like X25 and X400.  I only note
that the enormous effort put into these standards has not
resulted in direct telephone electronic mail or anything else as
widely usable as telefax.

	I am grateful for comments from many people on a version
distributed by electronic mail to various BBOARDS.