The Free ISP Model and Spinway, Inc.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since 1996, several major free ISP services have been founded in the US and elsewhere, including Spinway, Inc. Spinway's services were offered primarily through, and under the name of, large consumer companies such as Yahoo!, KMart, Costco, Spiegel, Barnes & Noble, Ace Hardware, and NBC among others. By early 2001, the free ISP market had been reduced severely, primarily due to the lack of revenues associated with such “free” services. Spinway, founded in 1998, was a major, and perhaps the largest, free ISP in the US with over 6 million customers at its peak. Spinway folded in December of 2000, and the remains of their services were taken over by Kmart's BlueLight.com. In November of 2002, BlueLight.com was sold to United Online and the ISP services available through BlueLight.com are no longer free. This teaching case discusses the viability of free digital infrastructures, such as Internet Service Providers (ISP). We seek to highlight and learn from the general issues experienced at Spinway and at other ISPs and Internet companies of the time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.064 | 0.017 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".