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Path: utzoo!watmath!bstempleton
From: bstemple...@watmath.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: The poster should pay for news
Message-ID: <5574@watmath.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 24-Jul-83 01:58:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: watmath.5574
Posted: Sun Jul 24 01:58:58 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 24-Jul-83 02:54:29 EDT
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 28
Wouldn't it be nice if the poster paid for the cost of transmitting
the news rather than those who get it? This would be like the postal
service or private publishing. What we have now is the receivers
and forwarders paying the cost. If we had USENET Inc. this could be
arranged. Then all the xxx@mit-eddies and Mad Programmers and people
on Soap Boxes and warlocks in dungeons and users of overworked keywords
and users of net.test and net.general would get a bill (no names, no suit)
for what they posted that month. One sure effect would be that people
would shut up.
Essentially, what I think we want is a system where the poster has to
pay but the receiver can accept collect messages. Thus most people will
say, "I'll accept collect from the following people", where those people
will be digest moderators (magazine editors) and wonderful people
like myself ( 8-> )
They might accept certain groups collect and some not. Thus if you want
to post, you can pay for it, in which case everybody gets it, or you
can send it to a moderator who can moderate it, or you can just send it
out and hope that enough people are willing to take it collect.
Note that libertarians (like me, in my own fashion) can't complain about
this idea because it includes the current system as a subset. If people
love the current system so much, they can elect to get everything collect
and get the same mess they have now. For myself, I know a fair number
of people I would not accept collect....
--
Brad Templeton - Waterloo, Ont. (519) 886-7304
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Path: utzoo!utcsrgv!utcsstat!laura
From: la...@utcsstat.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: The poster should pay for news
Message-ID: <796@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 24-Jul-83 15:24:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.796
Posted: Sun Jul 24 15:24:25 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 24-Jul-83 19:29:46 EDT
References: <5574@watmath.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 132
Brad (& everybody),
I have some problems with this scheme, allow me to outline them.
What would you do about the people who ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT
have net.jobs forwarded to their sites? They don't care who pays for
it; they just don't want their staff reading it and leaving their
company. I assure you that these folks exist.
I gather that there are others who feel the same way about
net.philosophy, net.flame and others. they are not worried about
costs, they simply dont want them on their machine.
What if I decide that I want only certain articles from
net.whatever? Either I personally have to keep a huge list of
which people I am willing to pay for, which I have to describe in
some way (for example, all new submissions, all submissions that
are less than 5 lines long and greater than 0 lines long, <not
counting headers!>, all submissions from sites that are within
80 miles from here, all submissions from the sites unc and ucmp-cs,
everything that mentions 16 and 32 bit computers, nothing that
mentions 8 bit computers, nothing from watmath!bstempleton < :-) >
anything from vortex!lauren and nothing from ucbvax).
Also at what level do we decide to pay for this? If the
"system manager" decides, then no net.jobs gets through, despite
internal interest. If the individual decides... have you ever got
a huge bill that you weren't expecting?
there are other logistics problems. When utzoo first joined
the net, many moons ago, the department of Zoology was in the middle
of a huge crack down on long distance phone calls. 3 hour connections
to duke didn't go over very well. In addition, we didnt have an auto-dialer
so every call meant that either Henry Spencer or myself had to babysit
the phone connection. I still chuckle when I hear the auto-dialer clicking
away as it dials out!
After one month, almost everything got the axe. FA.unix-wizards, NET.bugs.all
(yes those were the days of the NET and FA, not the net and fa) remained.
FA.space did as well (by Henry Spencer fiat) but FA.sf-lovers didn't, nor
did FA.human-nets. I remember calculating the costs of both of these
groups and staggering around the department and asking if anyone was
willing to pay one Xth of the cost.
The plan folded for several reasons. First of all, a share worked out
to ~50 dollars a month, and I wasn't prepared to pay that much. Secondly,
the atmosphere changed radically when people thought about paying for
it out of their own pocket.
Some people thought that Henry was being unfair and wanted to chew him
out about FA.space. I cooled them out. other people wanted to pay, but
they wanted the files read only by a group that they were in (at utzoo
we don't use groups for anything, everyone is in their own group, with
the group 'bin' and the group 'uucp' being the notable exceptions) so
that nobody could read sf-lovers without paying for it.
Some people wanted the lineprinter patrolled so that no one
made illegal copies of sf-lovers to be used by non-payers. I received
a lot of abuse when I mentioned that I intended to run off a line-printer
copy for me to read in class as usual, and that even worse I was going
to run off copies to take and post at csrg and at the physics department
as had been my normal habit.
What I found most frightening was that everybody was willing to appoint
me as facist leader and patroller of the lineprinter. I wasn't interested
in the job of fascist leader. Presumably there are people out there that
can stomach "security checks" and "law enforcement" but I am not
one of them.
I might have been willing to pay something around $50 for sf-lovers,
but I was not willing to be dictator for ANYBODY. I got out of the
"money for sf-lovers" business, and did without sf-lovers until
decvax offered to be utzoo's news feed (thanks decvax!) which was
a shorter hop, (thus a phone saving) and utzoo began to make money
for the department.
if we go with payments on the site or individual level, how
do we amortise the costs? If we go with Mike Lesk's scheme mentioned at
USENIX (everybody sends their L.sys information to <say> ihnp4,
in exchange for getting all the information back) we have gone to an
ARPANET situation where every machine calls every other machine.
(I know that I am oversimplifying, and ignoring the "super
secure" machines which cannot talks to the world at large). This
is fine for people with lots of money from the DoD to make phone calls
with but poorer sites cannot do this. However, we would all know that
ihnp4 could talk to everyone wouldn't we! I see ihnp4 becoming so swamped
with traffic that a vax isn't big enough, especially if Lauren Weinstein
starts selling his uucp to everyone with a micro.
Say we do not make ihnp4 the central site. Suppose we just
leave things as they are (I don't think we can do this forever either,
but ignore this). Now what. If I decide to pay for net.sf-lovers
from ANYWHERE, and you decide the same thing, do you subsidise
my costs, since utzoo will be sending sf-lovers to watmath where
you are if we continue as present? If this doesn't happen, and
each site pays the full cost of transport to that site the
situation for you and I out in the "middle of nowhere" will be
even worse than our current phone bill arrangements. In addition,
where does all the money go?
If we distribute the costs equally over every node on
the net, the folks far far away (Australia and England for instance)
are in for a price break, unless people in North America decide
not to cover the costs because they don't think that Australia is
worth it. The site that has never had a long distance call
in its life (lucky dog!) is not going to be thrilled at this new
prospect, and once again, we have curtailed access to a resource
to the rich alone. This might keep the micros out of usenet, which
is a good or bad thing depending on your point of view.
What I want to know is: HOW EXPENSIVE IS A SATELLITE CHANNEL?
At some point, it is going to make sense for decvax to pay for a
large chunk of a satellite, since they are already paying a fortune
in phone bills. the same can be said for ucbvax, and Bell as a whole
(though I gather from talking to Lesk Bell has some strange ideas about
what is cheaper and better when it comes to telephone bills).
Existing sites could pay for "their share" of the satellite. New
sites could pay for their share of the new computers needed to do
the crunching to handle their mail.
What do you think, gang?
laura creighton
utzoo!laura utzoo!utcsstat!laura (preferred)
ps Will someone see that Mike Lesk gets a copy of this, and Brad's
original article? I don't have a mail address for him, and I
would hate to be misrepresenting him.
laura
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Path: utzoo!watmath!bstempleton
From: bstemple...@watmath.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: The poster should pay for news
Message-ID: <5575@watmath.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 25-Jul-83 03:05:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: watmath.5575
Posted: Mon Jul 25 03:05:07 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 25-Jul-83 03:16:16 EDT
References: <796@utcsstat.UUCP>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 47
Well, let me expand upon several points.
This kind of scheme can only be done in a usenet, inc. scenario like
I and Mark Horton have proposed before, both on the net and at Usenix.
This is a system where the usenet is run by a profit-making company
that maintains a central node with all databases, routing information
etc. [There has been some debate as to whether such a company would
control the net against the wishes of its customers. I state again
that no company goes against the wishes of the people who pay it money,
and furthermore this company would work mainly as a store and forward
station and would make no judgements on content unless lawyers said
it would be forced to by law.]
As for deciding who you will accept from? Laura just made a short list
in a few minutes. It may not be complete, but the idea is that you add
something to the list when it starts to annoy you or you decide you
like it. Really not that much work, and not too much disk space when
it is on a site by site basis.
News distribution would not all be from the central site. Sites would
in fact pay a premium to be connected to the central site. Otherwise they
might redistribute the news on an "amway" or "pyramid" type basis, either
taking a (small) profit on what they pass along, or if they have a
non-commercial system, just taking their own news for free in exchange.
This only refers to collect news. I maintain that in this area we
have a system at least as good as the one now. Any debates about who
pays for what in the collect news are no different for what we have now
when it is essentially all collect. (ie. most of the cost, if not all,
is payed by the forwarding and reading sites)
If individuals start going crazy with postings like this month's 53
article winner, does anybody not think they should pay for this?
Usenet inc. is just a germ of an idea right now. It's main goal would
be to equalize and lower the cost of usenet to everybody. The main
thing blocking its formation is the fact that many netters are fooled
into thinking the net is currently free because rich companies handle
their costs (or the cost gets absorbed into their big corporate phone
bill) and they don't see why they should start paying for something that
is free.
(I don't know how much the net costs, my survey failed because nobody
has the time to work it out. It's not cheap, though. Ask Armando or
Bill Shannon!)
--
Brad Templeton - Waterloo, Ont. (519) 886-7304
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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!floyd!whuxlb!pyuxll!eisx!npoiv!npois!
hogpc!houxm!ihnp4!we13!otuxa!ll1!sb1!sb6!emory!gatech!spaf
From: s...@gatech.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: The poster should pay for news
Message-ID: <326@gatech.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 26-Jul-83 04:46:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: gatech.326
Posted: Tue Jul 26 04:46:39 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 27-Jul-83 21:56:33 EDT
References: <5575@watmath.UUCP>
Organization: Georgia Tech, School of ICS
Lines: 69
Time for my $.02 of soap...
I believe that if you set up some scheme of charging for news,
we would see the development of new news networks. There is
no reason to believe that Usenet would survive undiminished --
if at all. The first thing we would probably see would be
lots of cities developing their own isolated "islands" of
newsgroups, sort of like the regional newsgroups in use now.
Some of these "islands" might connect together by links from
machines whose operators/owners have access to 800 numbers or
the like. I mean, why pay for news when it is possible to
get any number of machines together for (nearly) free?
What would happen next is that smaller or isolated machines
would start dialing into machines in these "island" networks.
I'm not sure how the cost would be distributed, but I suspect that
it would be done close to the same as now. I suspect that we'd
see the net reduced to about 60% or so of current sites, and
these would be divided up into 4 to 20 separate or loosely
connected networks.
In parallel with this development we would see these isolated machines
and networks sending mail to each other. Does your proposal
include charging for mail transfer? If it doesn't, then
I'll just post all of my local net news articles to your
network "island" by mail and let you resubmit them there.
Since this will be quite a chore for me (and for you) we'll
write software to automate this process, and soon we'll have
another version of news software running -- which will require
more machine resources than the current system.
Suppose you charge for individual mail messages. How long do
you think the system would last? I suspect that any workable
system you would implement would cost so much extra in overhead
that it would be cheaper for each individual site to establish
their own connections. Thus, we'd end up with each site on
the network having huge L.sys files. Your new network would
be bypassed whenever possible and as a result would
probably not make enough to justify its continued existence.
CSNet is using a scheme similar to what has been proposed here.
You have to pay dues to join, all of the messages are routed
through 2 relay points which connect to other relays, and
message traffic is metered and charged for. However, $30K
per commercial site is a bit steep, don't you think? And for
me to send mail to Emory University, just a few miles away,
I have to incur the charges for a call to Delaware, and Emory
gets charged for another call from Delaware. Using uucp,
it is a local call. Needless to say, most CSNet sites will use
uucp if possible.
In conclusion, I think that any attempt to charge on a per-message
basis will only result in fracturing the network. Some might
argue that that could be desirable, but I won't. When you
buy a newspaper you buy the whole thing. You may not read the
sports section, you may not care about the stock prices, you
could probably not care less about the horoscopes -- but if
you want to read any of the news, you buy (and subsidize) the
whole thing. If we paid our newspaper reporters based on
how well we liked their style, or if reporters had to pay
to get their stories published, how many newspapers or magazines
do you think we'd have? If it was economically feasible, don't
you think someone would have tried it already?
--
The soapbox of Gene Spafford
CSNet: Spaf @ GATech ARPA: Spaf.GATech @ UDel-Relay
uucp: ...!{sb1,allegra,ut-ngp}!gatech!spaf
...!duke!mcnc!msdc!gatech!spaf
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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!seismo!rlgvax!cvl!umcp-cs!chris
From: ch...@umcp-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: The poster should pay for news, and CSNet
Message-ID: <1182@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 27-Jul-83 16:31:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1182
Posted: Wed Jul 27 16:31:50 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 28-Jul-83 15:10:41 EDT
References: <326@gatech.UUCP>
Organization: Univ. of Maryland, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 15
Gene Spafford has a point -- it's not all that cheap to call UDel-Relay
or Rand-Relay for all your mail. However, I'd like to point out that
you don't *need* to call one of those relays to talk to another CSNet
site. All you really need is to set things up with the other system to
call them directly. With MMDF II, this should become simpler (that's
assuming that MMDF II makes it out to/of beta test). Currently your
CPU time spent delivering mail will go up ridiculously for each site
you add.
- Chris
--
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci
UUCP: {seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!chris
CSNet: chris@umcp-cs
ARPA: chris.umcp-cs@UDel-Relay
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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!seismo!rlgvax!cvl!umcp-cs!chris
From: ch...@umcp-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: The poster should pay for news, and CSNet
Message-ID: <1182@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 27-Jul-83 16:31:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1182
Posted: Wed Jul 27 16:31:50 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 28-Jul-83 15:10:41 EDT
References: <326@gatech.UUCP>
Organization: Univ. of Maryland, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 15
Gene Spafford has a point -- it's not all that cheap to call UDel-Relay
or Rand-Relay for all your mail. However, I'd like to point out that
you don't *need* to call one of those relays to talk to another CSNet
site. All you really need is to set things up with the other system to
call them directly. With MMDF II, this should become simpler (that's
assuming that MMDF II makes it out to/of beta test). Currently your
CPU time spent delivering mail will go up ridiculously for each site
you add.
- Chris
--
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci
UUCP: {seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!chris
CSNet: chris@umcp-cs
ARPA: chris.umcp-cs@UDel-Relay