Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!gatech!ulysses!smb
From: smb@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com (Steven Bellovin)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: The death of USENET
Message-ID: <10373@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Date: 14 Jun 88 18:31:49 GMT
References: <7475@swan.ulowell.edu> <2645@rpp386.UUCP> <56228@sun.uucp> <641@scovert.sco.COM>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 62

Let me try to offer a brief summary on what's going on at AT&T Bell
Laboratories regarding Usenet.  This is not an official statement by
the company, but I was involved in many of the discussions that lead
up to the new policy.

In a sentence, what triggered all this was that top management (*very*
top management) noticed Usenet, and wondered if it was a Bad Thing.
Bad Things, in corporate America, are those that cost money, and it's
fairly obvious that Usenet has that potential in a lot of ways.  There
are obvious things like phone costs and disk space; there are less
obvious ones like employees reading netnews during work hours.  And
there was concern about lawsuits -- is AT&T liable for libel?  what
if someone uses a comp.sources program alleged to be public domain
but not really?  Etc.

After many meetings, reports, task forces, arguments, etc., the company
decided to manage netnews.  I won't go into all the details about what
that means internally, but one decision was to centralize the external
newsfeeds.  Such machines obviously need to be mail gateways as well;
this idea was useful for other reasons, such as providing internal users
with high-quality mail service to the outside world.  To encourage
migration to these gateways, a committment was made to provide official
funding and staffing -- netnews and mail is *not* a part-time activity
for the administrators of these machines.  (That, by the way, is why
folks can, should, and will subscribe to commercial email networks:
managing connectivity on a large-scale basis is much harder than just
sticking a line in the uucp Systems or L.sys file.)

The price of official support, though, is official control, and top
management did not feel that we should pay for carrying other folks'
traffic.  This is especially true when you realize that our gateways
would then compete with our own commercial service, ATTMAIL.  Hence
the decision to stop forwarding 3rd-party mail.

Note what we're not doing:

	a) We're not cutting off email contacts to the outside world.
	b) We're not dropping off of Usenet -- it's officially blessed
	   here, though there may be some deletions from the list of
	   newsgroups carried.  (I've personally recommended that as
	   a matter of corporate policy, binary groups be dropped --
	   the existence of electronic vandals makes such programs too
	   risky to the company.  We also don't permit people to bring
	   explosives on-premises.)
	c) We're also not cutting off internal feeds, at least not as
	   a matter of High Policy.  Some local decisions may have
	   been made -- Bell Labs is a big place -- but I can state
	   categorically that that is not Bell Labs-wide policy.  A lot
	   of wild rumors have been floating around about this; any
	   time a news feed hiccups, 17 worried postings appear asking
	   if the axe has dropped.
	d) We're not cutting off our backbone machines without a lot
	   of thought, preparation, and planning.  Such a change probably
	   will happen eventually; hence most AT&T machines will be
	   deleted from the external backbone at some point.

None of this has to do with JJ or any other single incident; the origins
of this go back over a year, with some aspects going back to at least 1982.

		--Steve Bellovin
		AT&T Bell Laboratories
		ulysses!smb