From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!alice!sjb Newsgroups: net.news Title: Re: USENET Inc - what do YOU think Article-I.D.: alice.1392 Posted: Mon Jan 10 22:31:36 1983 Received: Tue Jan 11 01:53:44 1983 References: cbosgd.2952 The ideas of control and funding do not strike well with me. I will address them separately here: 1) Allowing one group to control the net is not a pleasant idea at all. PLATO (now run by CDC) has a good idea in that one organization cannot get more than x number of connections to it. This means that no one organization will ever have the muscle to take over PLATO. If we allow one organization to run the net, we will be at its mercy. Further, if it pays the bills, it will have every right to dictate what it's paying for, i.e. direct or indirect censorship of the net, at the very least dictating what can and cannot be discussed. 2) Requiring funding has many flaws, the worst of which is that if you impose dues, fees, whatever on member sites or individual users, you will (1) probably find that a GREAT many sites will immediately drop out of the net because they do not want/are not able to pay the costs and (2) find that people will go out of their way to get around paying dues. Now, if we lose, say, half of the net, we might as well pack it in. Connections, some of them major, will be broken and the entire topology of the net will be disrupted, not to mention the loss of half of our contributors (I refer specifically to the loss of a good portion of our 'technical pool') Avoiding paying for the net will include forgery of articles (now a VERY simple task), bootlegging (as Mark said), and even forging of entire machines: Given the present UUCP software, I can set a machine up, call it anything I want (specifically the name of another machine on the net), and send news to any other machine on the net (since there is no way to prevent someone from sending to you) as if I were a paying machine. If you're going to charge individual users, again, you will see a great many drop out. Personally, I would refuse to pay a subscription fee for the net out of my own money and I would not except my employers to pay for it for me. We are NOT running a newspaper or a magazine here, and I don't think we should try. In closing, I would like to say that the net is now a free format, open grounds for discussions on any topic. Those who wish to partake in the discussions are free t; those who do not are free not to. The net is not now a business, it is like a gigantic gabbing session. No one tells anyone else what they can/cannot post, and no one tells anyone else what they can/cannot read. What people are suggesting is turning the net into a business (both profit making and non profit making) If I want to read a paper, I'll go out and buy one, but I can't put anything I want into that paper. I can with the net. If you turn it into a paper, people will not be able to do that as freely as they now can. Adam