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From: karish@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Chuck Karish)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: Censorship on the USENET
Summary: Cooperation
Message-ID: <1990Oct23.122756.6885@morrow.stanford.edu>
Date: 23 Oct 90 12:27:56 GMT
References: <RMZ.90Oct20170121@gode.uio.no> <1990Oct21.141502.26557@hoss.unl.edu> <sean.656539237@s.ms.uky.edu>
Sender: news@morrow.stanford.edu (UNIX News Service)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Mindcraft, Inc.
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In article <sean.656539237@s.ms.uky.edu> sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes:
>riddle@hoss.unl.edu (Michael H. Riddle) writes:
>
>|What I mean is that the people paying the bill ought to have the right to
>|say how their resources are being used.  While there are many good
>|purposes served by a free and open exchange of ideas on a wide variety of
>|subjects, I personally have some doubts that public funding, either from
>|my country or yours, ought to be involved in some of the discussions we
>|find on the net.
>
>I agree with this position, however...
>
>What if the admins decided they didn't want to carry just
>soc.culture.african.american? [ ... ]

USENET is a very loose voluntary organization.  People are willing
to volunteer time and resources to propagate all sorts of stuff
they don't particularly care about, because they also get the
things they're really interested in.

Carrying more groups than serve your immediate purposes is the
price you pay for the service.  If the site that feeds you were
to pare down their sys file to just what they read, you'd probably
lose several groups that are important to you.

If it's worthwhile to have a USENET feed, it's worth paying
the overhead, which involves (1) being willing to feed others
and (2) carrying more than you read, in order to do (1).  Once
the system is im place to provide what you want, the marginal
cost to carry more groups is not great.  The political cost
is another issue; I hope these arguments will help some to
balance it.

--

	Chuck Karish	karish@mindcraft.com