Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mcnc!ecsvax!skyler
From: skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Patricia Roberts)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Suggestions for a new backbone (was: Re: comp.sys.next, voting, etc.)
Message-ID: <5638@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>
Date: 24 Oct 88 12:00:39 GMT
References: <5178@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <8187@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US> <7133@dasys1.UUCP> <2198@looking.UUCP>
Reply-To: skyler@ecsvax.UUCP (Patricia Roberts)
Organization: UNC Educational Computing Service
Lines: 36

In article <2198@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:
>Face it.  The people who own the sites on this net own their sites.
>They will do with them exactly what they will.  They have no duty to feed
>or not feed anything to anybody.   Democracy is meaningless because in the
>end, if a site owner wants to disagree with a "majority decision" then
>the site owner is free to do exactly that.

Mercifully, I have blocked many of the details of last spring's debacle.
However, as I remember it, it was not merely a question of X person (whose
name I have long since entirely blocked) not getting that group at his
site, but making certain that nobody got it.  That, it seems to me, is
not a working anarchy, but a tyranny of the minority.

Nor is it a situation which would be solved by the proposed oligarchy.
As I understand it, the problem was that the group could be removed by
many people.  One (or maybe two or three--I don't remember) person would
not abide by the procedure which was supposed to be in effect then.  They
could just as easily not follow a new procedure.

[Perhaps the solution is to rationalize not the voting, but the method for
creating a new group--who has that ability and who doesn't.  If there were
only one site which could issue create and remove group notices, then the
procedure would at least be predictable.  Granted, if there were one site
which could issue create and remove group notices, that site would be
hated by everyone.]

Although I was furious at the time, in retrospect I have to admit that
(as far as I know) that was the only time such insanity happened. Perhaps
I am innocent, but it seems to me that to abandon a system or create a
new one because of one (albeit extremely unpleasant) breakdown is
overkill.
-- 
====================================================================
-Trish 					"...a lifetime is too narrow 
skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu		too understand it all..."
	  						--A. Rich