Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!oliveb!sun!plaid!chuq From: chuq@plaid.Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: The death of USENET Message-ID: <56228@sun.uucp> Date: 11 Jun 88 23:43:51 GMT References: <7475@swan.ulowell.edu> <2645@rpp386.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.uucp Reply-To: chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) Organization: Fictional Reality Lines: 103 >Yesterday AT&T announced that ihnp4, cbosgd and att would be severing all >outside links and discontinuing third party mail. ihnp4 has been around >since I first started using the net 6 or 7 years ago, I do not welcome >it's passing any more than I welcomed the divestiture. But with abuses >such as these, I wonder why AT&T provided those machines free of charge >for the net for all of these years. >USENET has been mortally wounded with the passing of ihnp4. From where >I am sitting the prognosis is not good. How many hundreds or thousands >of systems will now be stranded? And how long before the increased >pressure of cummulative cruft on the remaining sites forces those machines >to also pass by the wayside? The death knell for USENET has been rung many times in the past. By myself more than once in the ten years I've been hanging around this place. I've always counted myself lucky when I come in in the morning and USENET is still here. But somehow, almost miraculously, USENET's survived. Not just survived, but prospered. Through the works of many folks -- Rick and Mark and Spaf and all the others over the years -- and through some luck, it's survived. This isn't the first time a change of this size and magnitude has occured, frankly -- the passing of seismo and transfer of power to uunet; or the shift of decvax from major node to sideliner. It's going to hurt. USENET is going to have to accept it and modify itself to survive. It always has in the past, though. I don't see any reason why that can't happen again. There are two main thrusts that I think need to be considered here. Both have been discussed many times in the past, privately, publicly, sometimes heatedly. But it's time to deal with some issues instead of just argue them. o Commercialization of USENET: face it. USENET is ALREADY commercial. Always has been. Public access systems and uunet are not evil forces, they are systems that recognize the needs of the net and its users (remember this, something oft forgot here in the byte patterns: the NET is nothing. What is good for the net is nothing. What matters is what is best for the readers of the net, even if that means tearing it asunder) It's time to stop decrying the "commercialization" of this "last bastion of freedom of the universe" -- the bill has come due, and it should now be obvious to all that USENET is not free, we've just been freeloading. Freeloaders have no rights. A major cornerstone of the future of USENET has to be services like uunet. As AT&T goes, more and more backbones will be forced to follow, as folks try to find other "free" services to feed their habits. And nobody, no combination of backbones, can take up the slack for what AT&T's done. So there will have to be a domino effect here. Uunet is going to be a cornerstone, but I don't think it can do it alone. What will probably have to happen is a new, "commercial" backbone of services like uunet that all talk to each other and handle the connectivity of the network. No company is going to be able to (much less willing to pay for) that anymore at the current size. o Everything for everybody: [excuse me, I need to get out my asbestos crutches for this.....] The other realization that people have to make is that USENET can no longer afford to be everything for everybodt. It is simply TOO BIG. The traffic volume, and the attending E-mail, overwhelms the system, and the system can't cope. It is time to take a close look at USENET and what it ought to be, and then reshape the net to fit that purpose. This will set a number of people adrift. So be it. The net can't support everyone anymore; it's time to realize that and do some rational surgery now rather than have the net die of obesity and lose it for everyone later. I think it is time for USENET to diet. USENET's focus started as, and it a good degree always has been, Unix and computers (more or less in that order). That's what USENET is best at as well. The other stuff, it's nice, as long as you can afford it, but without the computer stuff, USENET wouldn't have ever gotten started. Here's my proposal of cuts. Guaranteed, I'll bet, to piss off everyone in some way or another. But when radical surgery is necessary, these things happen. For USENET to survive, we need to cut: o comp.binaries.all o comp.sources.all, EXCEPT Unix sources. o talk.all o soc.all o rec.all -- maybe keep rec.arts.sf-lovers. o misc.all -- look at case by case. And if, when that's done, we still haven't cut enough, cut the microcomputer groups free. The need is to bring USENET volume back down to tolerable levels -- which I'm somewhat arbitrarily building a cutoff level of a megabyte of news a day. About 1/3 of current levels. This is going to be painful. For me, personally, it's especially painful because if you look closely, I've targetted just about every USENET group that means anything to me. But these are not times to be selfish. These are times of survival. Which I hope sinks in around the net. But I doubt it. Chuq Von Rospach chuq@sun.COM Delphi: CHUQ Robert A. Heinlein: 1907-1988. He will never truly die as long as we read his words and speak his name. Rest in Peace.