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From: spaf@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
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