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From: tmb@wheaties.ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel)
Newsgroups: news.admin,alt.config
Subject: UUCP in Germany
Message-ID: <3202@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 25 Jun 89 22:05:04 GMT
Organization: MIT AI Lab, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 30

Several (random) observations, questions, and comments:

o It seems somehow wrong that unido could try to impose any re-distribution
  restrictions on USENET articles. Implicitly (and some of them explicitly)
  USENET articles are freely redistributable but still copyright by the
  authors.

o German sites could (and some of them probably do) save substantial amounts
  of long distance charges by maintaining a telephone number in the US.
  You can charge AT&T calls originating in Germany to a US calling card
  and get AT&T rates (although they are not the lowest possible rates).
  You can also use callback to get direct-dial rates to/from the US.

o I'm not quite sure how a German site would (legally) connect to a
  modem in the US. I would assume that there are no Bundespost approved
  modems that understand US (e.g. Bell) modem protocols, and that a
  site in Germany that wanted to talk to a site in the US would have to
  hook up a US modem illegally to the German telephone system. How
  does this work? Are there actually "legal" 9600/19.2k modems in Germany?

o The idea of a central backbone (unido) charging for all of a country's
  USENET traffic seems wrong. The costs that unido has for pulling articles
  over the Atlantic should be redistributed equally among its immediate
  neighbors in Germany. Each neighbor could then decide to let other
  hosts connect to them and redistribute their costs further.
  Central network administration (just like central economic planning)
  always seems like a good idea at first but from all the examples I
  have seen always fails miserably.

					Thomas.