Path: utzoo!attcan!telly!evan
From: evan@telly.UUCP (Evan Leibovitch)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Some questions about USENET and commercial sites
Message-ID: <822@telly.UUCP>
Date: 18 Mar 89 22:11:33 GMT
References: <7105@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <2958@looking.UUCP>
Organization: The Open Vapourware Foundation (join now!)
Lines: 33

In article <2958@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:

>Genie is no different from Portal or the Well.
>The difference is just one of degree.  Genie charges more.  I say leave it
>up to the customers to decide which timesharing service gives the best
>value -- it's not for us to judge the price.  There is no question in
>my mind that if Genie has to go, then Portal, Well and all fee-charging
>sites have to go, unless they are explicitly non-profit as UUNET is.
>This would be a mistake.

I agree. My only concern in all this was raised once before, during
debate over a potential Usenet/Compuserve gateway.

If r.h.f. gets sent to Genie, will jokes posted to Genie be brought to
Usenet? Will Genie be a black hole into which Usenet postings go, without
us seeing what's added by Genie subscribers?

Public-access-for-pay Usenet sites, even leaf nodes, contribute to the
net by spreading around the postings of their subscribers. I make a real
distinction between these and sites such as Compuserve, which do not
share their contributors' postings with anyone but other subscribers.

If the flow of information, be it jokes, source code or abortion arguments,
travels in both directions, the gateway can only be a benefit. If Brad gets
free time on Genie to help make it work, God bless.

But if the Usenet-to-Genie path is one-way only, I do object.

-- 

 Evan Leibovitch, SA of System Telly, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
     evan@telly.on.ca / {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
You can lead a herring to water, but you have to walk really fast or he'll die