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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!oliveb!Glacier!adobe!greid
From: greid@adobe.UUCP (Glenn Reid)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Let's talk about phone bills
Message-ID: <779@adobe.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 26-Oct-85 16:40:18 EST
Article-I.D.: adobe.779
Posted: Sat Oct 26 16:40:18 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 27-Oct-85 10:36:08 EST
Organization: Adobe Systems, Palo Alto
Lines: 29


This is all very interesting to me.  I am undecided who is right and
who is being paranoid.  One of the big issues seems to be:  "If we
don't curb this sort of thing now, the whole net will collapse".

Is this true?  Is is necessary that news feeds be so centralized,
the result being that they cannot *afford* to propagate the news?

It strikes me that there are a large number of sites on USENET, and
that the connectivity is relatively low.  This means that a lot of
the news gets sent from Boston to San Francisco between two "backbone"
sites who incur all the phone bills, then gets locally distributed
to all the smaller sites who read it, post flames, and run up the
phone bills of the "hub" sites.  This is an oversimplification, of
course, but tends to be true.

Question:  What gains can be made in terms of more carefully chosen
news connections?  Can they be maintained separately from regular
uucp/mail connections? (I doubt it).  Maybe I don't have the big
picture (I *know* I don't have the big picture) but maybe some gains
can be made in other ways than nuking newsgroups so that the wants
of the many are not serviced at the expense of the few.

Comments?

Glenn Reid
  decwrl!adobe!greid
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