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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxn!ihnp4!stolaf!umn-cs!mmm!rosevax!dicomed!meccts!ahby
From: ahby@meccts.UUCP (Shane P. McCarron)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: Causes on the net...
Message-ID: <221@meccts.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 8-Sep-85 13:56:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: meccts.221
Posted: Sun Sep  8 13:56:36 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Sep-85 04:47:17 EDT
References: <60@l5.uucp> <776@vortex.UUCP>
Reply-To: ahby@meccts.UUCP (Shane P. McCarron)
Organization: MECC Technical Services, St.Paul, MN
Lines: 23

In article <776@vortex.UUCP> lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) writes:
>Hmmmm.  It seems to me that to some extent, we are ALL "freeloaders"
>on this net, since none of us pays the full cost for distributing
>our message throughout the network.  We may pay a little for the
>initial sending of the message... but after that it vanishes
>into the abyss of the net and is paid for by virtually everyone.

If you think about the economics of the situation, you will realize
that no one on the net is really a "freeloader".  Sure, you only pay
for the initial cost of each message you send;  but you also pay for
the intermediate or final costs for everyone else.  In this way you
are paying for the full trip of your message.  One might say that
sites that only receive partial feeds are "freeloading", since they
are not supporting the costs of all the material they aren't getting.
However, there aren't that many partial feeds, and they don't feed
other people anyway.

-- 

Shane P. McCarron
Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation - Technical Services

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