Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!giza.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl From: karl@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: unido making commercial use of the net Message-ID: Date: 26 Jun 89 19:31:40 GMT References: <2116.orcenl@orcenl.uucp> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 53 In-reply-to: news@orcenl.uucp's message of 26 Jun 89 10:59:13 GMT news@orcenl.uucp writes: One thing we (as a mail/news community) can and do decide about is how we organize our selves, You are certainly free to organize your internal community in any way you see fit. However, if certain individual sites - which just happen, quite coincidentally, to fall within the geographic borders of Europe - choose to set themselves up as some other sort of community, because they feel they have found a better internal community structure, then they constitute another distinct community. It seems to me that EUNet has no business "blacklisting" those sites from using their own links at their own cost for the purpose of pushing mail around. This is apparently so because of the way that EUNet controls (that is, restricts) registration of European UUCP sites. I have not yet seen anyone from EUNet refute the premise that mail traversing the uunet->mcvax link will be dropped or returned if EITHER the source or intended destination is an unregistered site. (This is my understanding; if it is genuinely incorrect, please enlighten me.) By itself, this would be fine. But in combination with EUNet's control over who gets registered, and specifically refusing to register anyone who does not pay the EUNet fees, this constitutes a fairly clear case of "blacklisting" such an external community. If EUNet would allow open registration but then implemented schemes whereby non-EUNet mail would avoid routing over EUNet-sponsored links, the problem would be gone. They would justly retain control over what may pass on their links, while allowing general UUCP host registration. and I really don't think that very many of us would like an organization like the U.S.-style. Perhaps not very many would. "Not very many" != "none." There is no reason for that non-empty set of sites to be blacklisted by EUNet merely because they have an alternative and non-interfering community structure. It IS a matter of costs, all this is NOT free, and even though some US sites announce that any European (or other) site can have some of their CPU cycles, disk space and organization, please remeber that this IS paied by someone; CPU cycles, disk space and manpower are NOT free. I submit that, from my perspective, as a sysadmin in the US offering such services to any European site which cares to ask, the cost is indeed zero. I would spend almost no time writing to hostmaster@sri-nic.arpa registering a domain; I would spend even less time adding configuration details to my Systems, paths, and sendmail.cf files; the disc space exists and is underutilized (nearly 100Mbytes sits largely idle); the system in question actually exists specifically for the sake of UUCP connectivity. The incremental cost of such new connections is indeed zero. --Karl