Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 15:40:42 -0400 (EDT) From: Michael Black To: letters@hour.ca Subject: CAM internet to disappear CAM Internet is about to disappear forever, with a vote on Saturday the 17th to hand the assets over to something called Cooptel, and dissolve the company. If CAM wasn't the first local ISP, it was amongst the first, and at this point I doubt any local ISP has been around as long. It was revolutionary when it began, because circa 1992 Internet access was limited to universities and some businesses. I doubt when they started it they thought there was any profit in it, hence it was created as a non-profit business. When I got there right at the end of November 1996 (after our "Freenet" disappeared after 3 years of waiting and 4 months of actual operation), they were preparing for the court battle to ensure that CAM really act like a non-profit. It was still revolutionary, with local newsgroups so the members could actually talk together and with the system administrator and even the higher ups. There was an amateur packet radio node connected to it, and a really useful FAQ that basically answered everything over the years I was there. But, the people wanting to "save" CAM saw the most important thing being the non-profit angle, not what they could do with it. I swear money was spent on advertising in relatively useless places, in effect giving money to those places. The people behind the court battle, Julian Feldman and Claire Robitaille would tell us that all kinds of evil things would happen if we were taken over by a big ISP. But, I date the decline from that point, say early 1997, when it started acting like a real non-profit. There was an attack in 1999, and they turned off the shell without telling us. I had moved to CAM in the first place because I was using a simple computer, and shell access was about all I could use. It was a basic part of the package, and we were paying a premium compared to other ISPs. But they turned it off, because it was seen as the entry point of the attack, and three days later I realized there had been no catastrophic failure, that I couldn't access my account because they'd turned off the shell. They scapegoated the shell users, and proclaimed that it would cost way too much money to bring it back, while making it safe. It eventually returned, but not before losing long time members who didn't like the attitude. There were a few years where the Usenet newsgroups declined, again they didn't want to "waste" money on something few were using (though when CAM had begun, most users would at least know about the newsgroups), until they finally disappeared in January of 2002. Temporarily, they said, while the servers were moved, and they kept that up until May, when they finally announced they'd not be coming back, due to cost. But we were paying a higher price than most ISPs. So community disappeared, and they slicked up the webpage but couldn't bother providing any news of what was happening. The useful information disappeared. They started giving special rates if you were a member of a co-op or some other specialized group, while people who simply lacked much money didn't get a break. It was the only local ISP where the users were members, and there was an AGM every year, starting in 1997. But they never used the internet to provide information to lure us to the meetings, instead they built up a culture of meeting goers. We stopped hearing from board of directors except at vote time, and once the newsgroups went away, we never heard from them. Not only did they not put up much information about the AGM ahead of time, but rarely did we see a followup to what happened, giving most of us even less interest in caring about the AGM. It ceased to be a revolutionary place long ago, taken over by "revolutionaries" who were more interested in having those meetings than using the technology to build community and changing the involvement of people. Last fall, they sent out some typically obscure notice mentioning Cooptel for the first time, and then some paper mailing that never said why we were hearing about cooptel. Then a week before the end of November, they sent out a notice that the phone numbers were changing, and something about how we had to join Cooptel to keep using the system. They couldn't be bothered to reply to my email asking what it was about, in the nine years I was there, I think I got a reply once to email about policy. Since I didn't know what was happening, I abandoned them after exactly nine years, and giving up my email address of all those years, which in effect was my internet identity. That's how little they cared about customers/members. Ironically, the AGM was that final week in November, but the vote about the matter was too late for something they'd already put in motion. Having a vote means nothing if you aren't kept informed in the first place, and get railroaded into voting for something others have already decided. I figured this wasn't an alliance, that as happens so often, the smaller company would disappear into the bigger one. And seeing Cooptel as a sponsor of the Fringe, when it's been CAM for years (though they never used the Fringe to set up a public access terminal), I checked the website and learned of the vote. Almost ten years ago, there was talk of how you dissolve a non-profit, and it would seem one way is to sell out to a bigger one. People who were members last September can vote, but who will know? If you left, they aren't making an issue of it. And obviously, it's too late to save CAM. Good riddance to CAM, the meeting goers ruined something badly and really have no clue about the potential of the internet to make change. P.S. I moved to the second oldest ISP in town, Pubnix, and they are far friendlier in a month or so than CAM ever was in nine years.