Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!oliveb!tymix!epimass!jbuck From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: A Thought Experiment about News.Groups Message-ID: <3254@epimass.EPI.COM> Date: 30 May 89 17:46:50 GMT References: <371@odi.ODI.COM> <3400@looking.on.ca> Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA Lines: 62 In article <3400@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) discusses his interpretation of the history of Stargate. Check it out. The real problem with Stargate was that it simply was not economically feasible. The costs announced for a Stargate feed were very high, it was to be moderated groups only, and the announced restrictions on outgoing feeds made the financing look even worse. Some of the justifications given for the refeeding restrictions looked like "we own the material", when in fact they did not, at least, not without the permission of the posters. But for all the legality, morality, and technical issues that people can come up with, Stargate flopped because it simply cost too much. The availability of UUNET sunk the project completely, since UUNET gives its customers far more services than Stargate ever could, for a lot less money. Thanks to UUNET, the costs of Usenet are now being borne much more evenly in the US than they ever were before. Wider use of NNTP means the Internet is also used more heavily, but we're all paying for that through our taxes. Anyone who runs phone bills like decvax did in the old days to support the net has rocks in his or her head; it's simply not necessary. AT&T has gone from net benefactor to the world's biggest leaf node. There are sites in people's basements in California that get mail and news from uunet, paying their own way all the way. We don't need no steenking backbone. That's why it is no more. About Stargate and the "You may only distribute this article if your recipients may" gang, Brad writes: >They thought they were fighting for free flow of information. Instead >they hurt the project, and just made everybody pay a lot more for their >datacom. The only benefit was to the phone company. Wrong. We are, today, paying substantially less money for our datacom. Stargate deserved to die; being techically interesting isn't good enough. You run a business, Brad, and you know that. If you're competing with someone who delivers more service, more flexibly, for less cost, you fold up and go out of business. >Today satellite technology is much cheaper, and a site in Vancouver is >feeding usenet into a data channel with no restrictions just to help >sell satellite decoder boards. As well, the internet now carries much >of the inter-city usenet traffic, eliminating the wasteful links. Exactly. People on Usenet are willing to pay for data-moving capacity, and people will pay money if they can save money in the long run. You seem to want to turn Usenet into Compuserve, and if we wanted that, we'd drop our Usenet feed and sign up for Compuserve. >But the reason I tell this story is to remind people that on usenet, >it seems impossible to do anything constructive if it might involve >any level of control. No. Stargate simply wasn't constructive. It was a technically interesting project run by well-intentioned people that failed. UUNET was extremely constructive, and made possible things that were never possible before. -- -- Joe Buck jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck