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From: vixie@palo-alto.DEC.COM (Paul Vixie)
Newsgroups: news.admin,comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: The rebirth of USENET
Message-ID: <3205@palo-alto.DEC.COM>
Date: 25 Jun 88 02:25:28 GMT
References: <585@cbnews.ATT.COM> <1100@bellboy.UUCP> <3095@palo-alto.DEC.COM> <13758@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Reply-To: vixie@volition.UUCP (Paul Vixie)
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation, Western Research Lab
Lines: 53

In article <13758@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> casey@admin.UUCP (Casey Leedom) writes:
#   Even if x!att!y will be allowed, Paul's argument falls down because it
# states that it's perfectly ok for AT&T to say ``We're not going to let
# people to use our internal network links.'', and [implicitly] that it's
# ok for AT&T to use USENET's internal network links (USENET is of course
# not owned by a single organization, but it is an informal COOP).
# 
#   Why should a user on site "att" be able to send messages to X!Y!Z using
# the network links between X and Y, and Y and Z?  X, Y, and Z may belong
# to the same organization or separate organizations, but they may all be
# considered to belong to the virtual USENET organization.

So does AT&T, though, belong to the virtual USENET organization.

#   Again, if AT&T were a poor site without much money or traffic, network
# charity would be the name of the game.  But AT&T is not deserving of such
# charity.

Charity?  Hey, but there are a lot of very smart people inside AT&T that I
want to exchange mail messages and news articles with.  Sure, AT&T brought
us System V, but there are other parts of the company that have perfectly
decent and fun people :-).

It's not charity.  The only thing anybody has ever had a right to ask of any
USENET site is that they be willing to forward mail and/or news to other sites;
AT&T is going to keep doing this, probably on a large scale, but only from one
point inside their organization.

There's no way anyone can require that AT&T provide UUCP access to all the
machines on their internal net -- the administrative headache alone is more
than they can afford to WASTE.  They are on the net for their benefit, and
if they drop out because of rudeness on our part, we will incidentally be
much worse off for it.

#   I don't want to knock the job that AT&T UUCP sites and their
# administrators have done, but it was they who took on those untold number
# of links.  If the load is too heavy, they should either cut back on the
# number of links and still remain full partners in USENET, or, if they
# want to be a leaf node, they should subscribe to uunet just like anyone
# else.

Um, yeah, they can subscribe to uunet.  Uunet's customers would have to
touch all that outgoing mail, though, and the customers pay for it.  I.e.,
mail from att to uunet!foo!bar is going to be paid for by "att" and "foo".

What would you prefer -- that AT&T maintain a machine on which they forward
a lot of local traffic (between their direct neighbors), or that they
disappear altogether?
-- 
Paul Vixie
Digital Equipment Corporation	Work:  vixie@dec.com	Play:  paul@vixie.UUCP
Western Research Laboratory	 uunet!decwrl!vixie	   uunet!vixie!paul
Palo Alto, California, USA	  +1 415 853 6600	   +1 415 864 7013