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From: dww@stl.UUCP (David Wright)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Who Pays?
Message-ID: <244@stl.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 31-Oct-85 14:42:18 EST
Article-I.D.: stl.244
Posted: Thu Oct 31 14:42:18 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 3-Nov-85 09:28:16 EST
Reply-To: dww@stl.UUCP (David Wright)
Distribution: net
Organization: STL,Harlow,UK.
Lines: 29

I don't understand all the stuff about backbone-sites-pay-for-it-all-so-they-
and-they-only-may-decide-what's-good-for-the-net.    Surely a feed site
doesn't call 'leaf' sites? They call it?   So feeding doesn't cost telephone
charges directly.  Most of what you feed on, you'd get anyway for your own
users.  

True for backbone sites there are costs, sometimes high ones, such as extra
modems and telephone lines, and also the cost of collecting groups to feed on 
that none on the local users want.  So why don't the backbone sites make a
charge for the service? - they do in Europe!   Many of our backbone sites are
Universities, which in the UK at least have NO money for anything - so if we
the users on the net didn't pay a share of what they do for us, they could
not do it.  mcvax especially has high costs due to trans-Atlantic data costs.

The actual cost per site is very small.

As we pay a share of the cost of the net, we expect to have our say in it.  So
let's not have more of that vote-elitism of "only backbone sites ought to be
able to vote".  We also have  a stake in how much the net costs, so I hope
we have a balanced view of whether high volume groups are worth their costs.

Maybe things are different in the US of A?  If the backbone sites there can 
afford to provide their services free, why are they complaining about costs
all the time?  If some can't, why don't they ask for subscriptions?  They
can always ensure that end-sites that won't pay (or that feed to sites that
won't pay) have to find a different feed site;  those who would pay if asked
nicely would get fed and those who wouldn't could look elsewhere.  Assuming
that as in Europe the only costs concerned are the genuine extra costs of being
a backbone site,  they should not be very high on a per-site basis.