Xref: utzoo news.admin:2573 comp.mail.uucp:1359 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!osu-cis!att!cbnews!mark From: mark@cbnews.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) Newsgroups: news.admin,comp.mail.uucp Subject: The rebirth of USENET Message-ID: <585@cbnews.ATT.COM> Date: 13 Jun 88 18:20:14 GMT Reply-To: mark@stargate.COM (Mark Horton) Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus Lines: 137 > Yesterday AT&T announced that ihnp4, cbosgd and att would be severing all > outside links and discontinuing third party mail. Please understand this is not what we are doing. We are not cutting our outside links. In fact, it was a strong need to keep our outside links running that led us to decide to stop passing third party email as the best way to cut costs. Mail into and out of AT&T through the "att" gateway will continue. "att" is serving as a professionally run replacement for ihnp4 and cbosgd. We are also not cutting off netnews (e.g. Usenet.) Our cutbacks all involve email. AT&T has a management committment to support netnews. > 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. There is, in fact, a major reshaping of the email world in the works. The current system is cooperative - people worry about delivering mail first, and getting it paid for isn't a concern. The telephone network was in a state similar to this in 1910 or so. There were many disconnected telephone systems, and some people offered gateways by subscribing to more than one and holding phones up to each other. With X.400 beginning to be offered, commercial mail services are springing up. These include ATTMAIL, Canada's Envoy, Britain's BTI, and so on. There are others, not all are X.400: MCIMAIL, Easylink, Dialnet, etc. (There are also services like UUNET which charge by connect time, and which are nonprofit. They don't seem to count.) These services all charge the *sender* (except for COD mail) for each message, and in general worry more about getting paid than about delivering the message. So they won't pass a message unless they know who to bill. As long as the commercial services are small, there's a horrible barrier between the two: nobody will admit to having a gateway because mail through them would be charged to the gateway. The commercial services will only send mail to places they have signed service agreements with each other. As the commercial services grow (there is an assumption that the bulk of the business users of email will sign up with commercial services instead of rolling their own in a cooperative network, and that we technical folks represent a tiny part of the market) the cooperative world will have more and more interest in talking to customers of commercial services. At some point, the center of gravity will shift to the commercial services and the cooperative folks will wind up hurting. The money that's funding the cooperative networks may dry up as the sugar daddies put it into commercial systems instead. Eventually we'll be at the level of HAM radio: small and specialized, and unable to be self sufficient. (A more frightening thought is that we may become, indeed are becoming, like CB radio: too much noise and too little signal.) (By the way, the commercial world is serious about email, but doesn't know what to do about netnews. It doesn't seem interested in it.) Over the next 5 or 10 years, the face of the world will change. We must either adapt to the change, or go away. The commercial services point out how much better off the world would be if everyone used the commercial services - a maximum of 2 hops, support, reliablity, very fast cross country delivery of email, access to the postal mail, telex, fax, etc. They also point out how the cooperative networks are paying the costs, often very high costs, but these costs are hidden as part of the usage of people, machinery, phone lines, and so on. On a nationwide basis, there is certainly an economy of scale. If you look at the telephone network (or the package delivery network) you see there are common carriers, and there are local endpoints. There is often no choice of local endpoint: you have one local phone company, or one company shipping & receiving department. But the sender, who pays for the call/package, chooses a common carrier to pay from several that are available. The common carriers compete among each other. In our world, the cooperative networks are just another common carrier (or group of common carriers.) If it's cheaper to deliver your mail yourself, you'll do it. I'm not going to put a stamp on a note to my 5 year old, either, or on company internal mail. PBX systems don't charge for calls to another extension. The commercial networks won't sign exchange agreements with cooperative networks, however. They want their money, and with random incoming mail from UUCP, you don't know who to send the bill to. In X.400 terms, exchange agreements are for ADMDs (Adminstration Management Domains) and not for PRMDs (Private Management Domains), and ARPA, UUCP, BITNET, et al are PRMDs. It may be necessary for the cooperative nets to become ADMDs, either collectively or separately. This could give them the clout and equality they need to survive and still have universal service. Each government decides who is an ADMD, and as far as I know, the US government has not yet stepped into the picture. There is another model besides the "lots of common carriers, sender chooses" model. In that model, the commercial services are both common carriers and endpoints. To send mail to a user at a particular endpoint, on a particular common carrier, you must pay that common carrier. Sender pays, but recipient chooses who the sender pays. I'm told that this is becoming a de-facto standard, that the commercial services put all their employees on their own service, as well as their customers, and they can only be reached through their own service. (In the case of two commercial carriers, there is a surcharge, not unlike buying more stamps to send a letter to a foreign country. The two carriers split the postage.) For a company that is new and their employees were never reachable by email before, this might work. But the eventual ramifications of this model for large companies, such as IBM, which owns MCIMAIL, are clear. It is for this reason that I personally prefer the "whoever pays chooses who they buy service from" model. Anyway, some evolution of the cooperative networks is inevitible. DOD wants out of the ARPANET business. Seismo and AT&T want out of the third-party-email-pass-through-for-free business. Many users of UUCP use UUCP email because no commercial service is available, and will shift to the commercial services. Those of us who are left need to decide how we want to fit into this brave new world, and adjust accordingly. One thing we ought to be thinking about is making netnews more independent of email. Right now netnews depends on existing UUCP email for lots of things: replies, moderated postings, control messages, test messages, setup, error messages, etc. (Can anyone add to this list?) As email as we know it crumbles, we need to make netnews more self sufficient. We also need to be thinking about fitting into the ADMD commercial world somehow. Comments? Mark