Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!abhg!carpet!bill
From: bill@carpet.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: The death of USENET
Message-ID: <95@carpet.WLK.COM>
Date: 13 Jun 88 19:35:31 GMT
References: <56228@sun.uucp> <8545@netsys.UUCP> <11929@mimsy.UUCP>
Reply-To: bill@ssbn.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy)
Followup-To: news.admin
Distribution: na
Organization: W.L. Kennedy Jr. and Associates
Lines: 38

In article <11929@mimsy.UUCP> mangoe@mimsy.umd.edu writes:
>One thing that strikes me about Chuq's proposal is that it proposes a "news"
>response to a "mail" problem.
>
>At&t's announcement doesn't mention news at all; indeed, if they simply cut
>off the news, there would be no need for the kind of announcement they made.
>But the announcement specifically refers to the volume of mail passing
>through ihnp4 as a cause.  And given the prevalence of pathalias, inhp4's
>traffic will visited upon some other site-- REGARDLESS OF THE EXISTENCE OF
>NEWS.

I agree with Charlie, but there are two points in addition to the ones he
makes.  AT&T has already curtailed the distribution of news among their
internal systems.  Some sites are specifically prohibited from getting a
news feed.  I will discuss (email please) the one's I'm personally aware of.

AT&T would injure itself if it isolated itself completely from news.  There
are business defensible reasons for having it available to the people who
can benefit, professionally, by it.  That sounds like a contradiction of the
first point but I can not comment on the rationale used to decide who was
and was not eligible to receive news.

Finally, news is a far more efficient method of distributing the volume
of general interest communication.  It takes advantage of batching and
compression, it can be graded to take advantage of time-of-day network
usage.  It is neither as personal nor as timely as mail, but it is a far
more efficient use of network resources.  I got the impression that what
AT&T said about mail was they would not allow my mail (non-AT&T) to go to
Chuq or Charlie (non-AT&T) through the AT&T gateways but I could still
correspond with Mark Horton (AT&T) and he with me, without restriction.
I find it difficult to object to any company saying "we are now going to
curtail the use of our resources to something more related to the benefit
of our organization".  No, I don't like it either, but it sure sounds
reasonable.  As was pointed out when the satellite TV programmers scrambled,
it's tough to convince someone that paying is a good deal when they were
getting it for free.
-- 
Bill Kennedy  Internet:  bill@ssbn.WLK.COM
                Usenet:  { killer | att-cb | ihnp4!tness7 }!ssbn!bill