Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-winken!uunet!bfmny0!tneff
From: tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: makin' profit at unido (Was : Re: An apology...)
Message-ID: <14420@bfmny0.UUCP>
Date: 27 Jun 89 18:22:20 GMT
References: <786@redsox.bsw.com> <263@icdi10.UUCP> <1444@laura.UUCP>
Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff)
Organization: ^
Lines: 48

In article <1444@laura.UUCP> jf@laura.UUCP (Jan-Hinrich Fessel) writes:
>In article <263@icdi10.UUCP> fr@icdi10.UUCP (Fred Rump from home) writes:
>>Also unido controls things tightly to feed anyone over there at a profit.
>
>Wrong. We don't make profit. In fact, our laws in gemany do not allow
>universities to make profit. The money we raise is used for maintenance
>of our equipment and for paying (small) wages to the students running the
>backbone, and last not least for paying our share of transmission-costs
>to the european backbone mcvax. 
>We have to spend money for running the backbone and for getting a
>computer on which we can do serious work, because our university
>is not willing to pay or contribute system-time anymore, and noone
>is donating us anything.

It would be more accurate to say that your laws require you to plow
your profits back into your plant, than to say you can't make any.

The reason this distinction is non-trivial is that bit about "getting
a computer on which you can do serious work."  Using revenues from
net participation fees for OTHER purposes besides providing the net
service itself, is what some folks dislike.

I could charge people for a newsfeed and set the rates so as to pay
not only for the computer and phone time (and operator time) involved
in providing the feed, but also to pay for the sheetrock on my back
porch addition, and a better VCR.  I might even complain that nobody
else seems willing to give me the money to do these things, so I have
to get it where I can.  I feel I would still be violating the spirit
of a not-for-profit operation, however plaintive my sheetrock situation.

Fortunately in this country there's lots of choice where you get a
newsfeed; if my subscribers felt I was padding my pockets excessively
they could and would go somewhere else.

That's where the monopoly comes in.  What if I was the ONLY feed site
in the state, and local regulations kept it that way.  THEN if I diverted
net revenues for other purposes, my subscribers would have nowhere else
to go and they would complain bitterly.  It's easy to guess what such
a discussion would sound like -- I think we're already having it. :-)

My advice to European sites is to put flowers in the State's gun barrels,
link up like crazy and create a free, anarchic net.  It worked here for
a while... sort of still does.

Tianmenet, anyone?
-- 
"My God, Thiokol, when do you     \\	Tom Neff
want me to launch -- next April?"  \\	uunet!bfmny0!tneff