Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!ctrsol!ginosko!uunet!mcvax!unido!isaak!woerz
From: woerz%isaak@isaak.uucp (Dieter Woerz)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: EUnet, unido and USENET
Summary: Redistribution problem
Keywords: unido, costs, contracts
Message-ID: <1018@isaak.UUCP>
Date: 24 Jul 89 21:55:42 GMT
References: <588@odin.cs.hw.ac.uk> <882@corpane.UUCP> <8594@attctc.DALLAS.TX.US> <1989Jul18.121524.15171@coms.axis.fr> <5084@ficc.uu.net>
Sender: news@isaak.UUCP
Reply-To: woerz@isaak.UUCP (Dieter Woerz)
Followup-To: news.admin
Organization: ISA GmbH, Stuttgart, West-Germany
Lines: 51

In article <5084@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
> ...
>	a) Sell feeds at some rate X. This would be adjusted so
>	   you make the necessary profit. Divide costs by feeds,
>	   and charge your *direct* feeds that amount.

That 's the first problem in my eyes. For this arrangement you have
to have a sufficient large amount of feeds or they must have some
feeds already, or the "direct" feeds have to pay very high prices for
the feed. The second will stop many connections from being
established in the first time, so the costs will remain high.

>	b) Allow the people you feed to sell their feeds at any
>	   rate they like. Dividing their costs by #feeds, for
>	   example, or whatever. You don't care... you get paid.
>	   If they charge too much people can always get feeds
>	   from you.

This is a second problem over here. If I remember correctly, most or
nearly most of the news reading sites are Universities and public
research organizations. Both these institutions have problems
"reselling" secondary news feeds to commercial or personal sites and
billing them, I think, because of the kind of contracts you have to
have with the receiving sites. And you can't get money from someone
without a contract with the person (difficult for Universities to
deal with, as someone said in an earlier posting) or company.
I think that's why unido introduced the tariff reduction, so that for
every 5 fed and paying (unido) sites, you get a reduction of you
news bills of 25%. So Universities can refeed without having to
hassle with contracts and their accounting department.

>	c) Sit back and watch a richly-connected network grow
>	   thanks to the invisible hand of market forces.

Perhaps some of you got now a better understanding, why there is no
such "richly-connected" network as in the states.

> ...

An other problem may lay in the fact, that EUnet (or dnet) is not too
well known here. I think, that in most Universities here, most
students are not allowed to read or post mail and news, because the
cpu-time is billed to the project they 're working on. For this
reason, maybe they even don't know about mail and news and don't
request a connection to news in their company after having finished
studying.

Dieter Woerz
ISA GmbH, Azenbergstr. 35 D-7000 Stuttgart-1 W-Germany
UUCP:           {pyramid!iaoobel,uunet!unido}!isaak!woerz
BITNET/EARN:    woerz@ds0iff5