Acceptable Use

Acceptable Use refers to a policy originally established by the NSFnet (National Science Foundation Internet) regulating the use of its network, and prohibiting commercial use. Today, an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) refers to the official policy statement as written by any network service or computer system provider.

Print Resources:

• The Internet Guide for New Users. Daniel P. Dern. McGraw-Hill, Inc.. New York. 1994. (ISBN 0-07-016511-4)

Detail:

Although the World Wide Web has faced criticism from some groups because of its apparent lack of structure and content control, most users of the Internet in general and the WWW in particular are subject to certain restrictions in the ways they can use this medium of communication.

History

The Internet developed from the computer networks of government regulated institutions (namely, the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and later, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Research and Education Network (NREN). As the linked networks of computers maintained by these agencies became crowded, commercial network service providers were established to provide an intermediary server link between local computers and the servers maintained by governmental agencies. These commercial servers provided a hitherto unknown luxury to corporations: namely, a new medium for business-related traffic. The growth in corporate membership led the maintainers of the governmental servers to establish a policy regarding the appropriate usage of government-subsidized parts of the Internet.

While commercial server providers continued to give accounts to any individual or institution able to pay for their services, the government-subsidized server agencies put a strict restriction on commercial traffic. The result was that the Internet backbone, the NSFnet, simply stopped transmitting the commercial messages which it received. This prohibition against commercial traffic was the first AUP established. In order to resume providing commercial traffic, commercial server organizations formed Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX), which is a commercial interconnection point independent of the NSFnet. The formation of CIX greatly increased the range of Internet activities.

AUP and today's Internet user

As already mentioned, most Internet users have to comply with an Acceptable Usage Policy established by their provider. Depending on the service provider, a user can be regulated in the following ways:

• The number of hours the user may be logged-on during a given time, and the amount of storage a user may take up on the server.
• The resources to which a user has access.
• The appropriate use of the site.

In addition, a user may be regulated not only by their provider, but also by the services and resources to which they connect.