Xref: utzoo news.admin:12646 news.misc:6231 comp.mail.uucp:6047 Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!vsi1!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.misc,comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: New rules for UUPSI Keywords: the achingly nuzzlable neck of TJ Flynn (tm xanthian lust, inc.) Message-ID: <1991Mar10.112826.2231@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 10 Mar 91 11:28:26 GMT References: <1991Mar05.190548.22965@ariel.unm.edu> <1991Mar09.171941.25115@ddsw1.MCS.COM> <9038@castle.ed.ac.uk> Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 72 aipdc@castle.ed.ac.uk (Paul Crowley) writes: > This is madness. PSI don't want your news, they want your money - it's > PSI customers that want the news and email. Dropping email designed > for the customers into /dev/null hurts the customers, not PSI. You're only looking at first order effects; the second order effect is that PSI loses customers because PSI's angered the larger net enough to cause that net to implement a boycott that makes PSI service less valuable to its customers than that of sites providing a full bidirectional feed, even at higher prices. > I take it you don't pay PSI for any service yourself. If you're trying > to persuade others not to either, fine - but don't do it with threats. A boycott is probably indeed a threat, but this country has a noble if spotty history of using boycotts to make sure that some customers aren't _forced_ to ride in the back of the bus. Suddenly populating the net with a new class of entities, leaves that cannot become nodes, is making second class citizens of part of the net. > I'm not a great fan of the market, but it seems to me the only useful > way to prevent this happening is to set up competitive alternatives. Probably so, but USENet as an entity is _extremely_ prickly about allowing a degradation in the qualities of a feed that are the essence of the net: equal rights to feeds, no censorship, rights to pass feeds on, use of public domain software to run the net, and so forth. Each time such a threat comes to the attention of the net, the cries of outrage, and the type of muscle flexing now being seen in news.admin, occur. If the collective will of the net is that there is a minimal level of service below which an entity is not allowed to participate in USENet, and the net can enforce that will, it is probably to the benefit of all participants that it do so, even if the "minimal level" is fuzzily defined. The net tends to be _very_ insistant that certain classes of behavior, and certain software problems, be cleaned up or disconnected, for instance. One of the ways the net has always grown and flourished is that leaf sites grow up to become nodes. Having a major player that tells leaf sites "you may not become a node and use this feed" puts a real damper on the natural growth pattern of the net. Making what was once a well connected, cooperative net, into a net heavily dependent upon a few, centralized feeds with major political clout downgrades the reliability and "atmosphere" of the net. For example, what do you think would happen to the net tomorrow if uunet were seized by its (hypothetical) creditors and sold off for parts, with no notice? We are already the victims of dangerous centralization, and there is no one visible making sure the net is still well interconnected in case a major player falls. Look what happened when _one_ site in Minnesota stopped feeding alt.sex.pictures: big chunks of the state lost the newsgroup, and the postings of complaint are still flying. Telling leaf sites they may not become better connected worsens this problem for all sites. This hurts us all. Kent, the man from xanth.