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From: fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: "NNTP has had a number of very bad effects on the net..."
Message-ID: <4277@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>
Date: 6 Jul 88 10:02:24 GMT
References:  <4244@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> 
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu
Organization: USENET Protocol Police, Western Gateway Division
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I concede point 1 about speed of article propagation. This was, in
fact, one of my goals. Netnews propagation across the Internet is
nearly as fast as an Internet mailing list.

You assert that this is bad, because it has increased the level of
idle chit-chat in netnews. It is not clear to me at all that the
effects are related. The ARPANET (and the Internet) have had much
faster message propagation in their mailing lists for many years,
and those mailing lists haven't suffered this effect, with the
exception of those mailing lists whose purpose is idle chit-chat
in the first place. Also, is there any particular newsgroup or
class of newsgroups that exemplify the effect you cite?

The secondary effect of people using mail in place of netnews is
not related to NNTP either; that has been going for a very long
time, because the UUCP network doesn't have a universally distributed
reliable mail system (Thanks AT&T!). This problem has gotten worse
due mostly to the increasing size of the UUCP network, rather than
to any improvements that may have been realized in speed of netnews
propagation. Also, I don't see people on the Internet engaging in
this particular breach of network etiquette, except to reach people
on the UUCP network. I assert that this is because the Internet
has a real, working electronic mail system.

How has increased speed of article propagation reduced the
effectiveness of the cancel control message?


In the second point, I quarrel with your wording; NNTP has to some
extent *changed* the economics of the network, but I don't think
they're messed up, although I'm sure that the Europeans would say
that the U.S. USENET has had its economics screwed up since the
word "go."

I was the one who suggested that the NNTP distribution network
should be set up to strictly reflect the physical connectivity of
the ARPANET; in this way you can make the guarantee that no article
will cross a physical link more than once, modulo IMP routing
irregularities. If one were then to convert all the public Internet
mailing lists to netnews newsgroups transmitted by NNTP, there
would be a number of very interesting effects, not the least of
which would be lower agreggate ARPANET traffic.

Unfortunately, I don't have the power to declare my views as
regulation; all I can do is persuade, cajole, and jaw-bone, and
my efforts in this regard have had little effect. It seems that
netnews links are built more on personal contacts than anything
else, and most of the system administrators I know are very reluctant
to take the initiative to contact an obvious neighbor and set up
the links on a more rational basis if they don't already know the
individual on the other side. Part of this is a trust problem -
can I trust the guy on the other end to provide reliable service,
and respond promptly to problem reports?

Also, be aware that Internet links cost too, just in different
geld. The ARPANET is being partially dismantled because DARPA got
its funding cut, they apparently see themselves as a research
organization, and the ARPANET is an operational network (the last
"experiment" that I know of that used the whole ARPANET as a test
bed was the beta-test of PSN release 7, and I think we're both
cognizant of the troubles THAT caused) which was a tremendous drain
on their resources.

The single biggest reason why the ARPANET is so congested today is
actually quite easy to identify: on January 1, 1983 it converted
protocol from NCP to IP/TCP, and thus was the Internet created.
The Internet has since seen explosive growth - it is estimated that
there are between 50,000 and 100,000 hosts on the Internet today.
The vast majority of the systems on the ARPANET today are actually
gateways to other organizational networks, and the offered load
from these other networks to the ARPANET is staggering. No wonder
the ARPANET is staggering under it. It also doesn't help that the
LANs connected to the ARPANET are primarily 10Mbit/sec Ethernets,
and the ARPANET IMP-IMP trunks are all 56Kbaud DDS circuits.

Prior to the release of NNTP, a number of organizations were
exchanging netnews over the Internet, either by batching with SMTP,
or by using UUCP over IP/TCP, and the numbers were increasing.
NNTP's release accelerated the exchange of netnews over the Internet
enormously, by using a much more efficient protocol, and by solving
the problem of local netnews access for sites without distributed
filesystems or the resources to run netnews on all their systems.

NNTP changed the economics from one of communications cost, to one
of CPU and disk cost. The limits are still there, they're just
different for the Internet sites. NNTP hasn't changed the economics
for a UUCP site, save that they might be able, due to the relative
ubiquitousness of the Internet, to get a full netnews feed physically
closer to where they are (and thus cheaper in phone bills). These
changes would have happened anyway for all organizations that have
internal networks or access to the Internet; NNTP just speeded it up.


I didn't understand what you meant in point three, can you expand it?
Particularly the part about backbone sites handling more "local"
traffic?

The effect of NNTP on the USENET backbone should be fairly evident;
if you look at a backbone map from anytime in 1985, almost all the
links are UUCP/Phone based, with a little TCP/UUCP going on. Now,
three quarters of the bacbkone is NNTP based links. In effect, the
USENET has a new backbone that is 56Kbaud or better bandwidth, with
very low message-switching time (10 minutes maximum at sites that
follow the recommendations in the NNTP release documentation), and
much more efficient in its use of transmission bandwidth between
sites (if a pure NNTP site is seeing more than 10% duplicates in
its news log, they've got a problem somewhere; typical UUCP sites
with redundant links should consider themselves lucky if they get
the agreggate duplicate rejection rate under 40%). Granted that
the new backbone may not be using the bandwidth of the underlying
network as well as it should be; this is not something I can fix.

I don't see the point of your comment about restricted NNTP links -
the only restricted backbone link in the U.S. (to/thru hao, now
ncar) went unrestricted again when they joined the Internet and
converted to NNTP.

Some people are probably asking themselves what the Internet is
getting out the deal. Answer: a computer conferencing system that
beats all hell out of mailing lists. When a mailing list converts
completely to a netnews newsgroup, you get:

1. reliability - no central distribution point because postings
	radiate out from their origin. Also, netnews revels in
	redundancy; in a properly set up netnews distribution
	network there are no single point failures. Mailing lists
	cannot do this because there is no duplicate control system
	for mail.

2. simplicity of administration - once netnews is set up, you have a
	distribution channel, and new newsgroups are very easy to
	add. The software automatically notifies everyone reading
	netnews that there is a new newsgroup, and would they like
	to read it?

	No more mailing list administration - readers of a newsgroup
	can come and go without notifying anyone. Mailing list
	administrators have to be notified when users appear and
	disappear.

	No more cryptic errors for the users to interpret - did that
	last mailing get to everyone on the list? What does this
	bounce mean?
	
	centralized information access - can you find every mailing
	list on the Internet?

3. efficiency - netnews by NNTP is delivered on a per-network basis,
	not a per-host basis, which means fewer long-haul connections
	to make in distributing the messages.

The only thing we can't really give people is privacy - so private
membership mailing lists will continue to exist.


In summary, I fail to understand your objections to the effects of
NNTP, given that you are a proponent of the free flow of information.
NNTP has made it possible for the network to grow much more quickly
and painlessly than it otherwise might have, and I think it has
staved off (albeit temporarily) the coming balkanization of the
USENET. There is more information flow through USENET because of
NNTP than there would have been without it.

In some sense, by turning up the volume, I'm hoping that I've made
the problem of information overload much more obvious to the software
writers of the network, and that they will come up with some attacks
on the problem that I haven't thought of yet.

	your rebuttal, sir?

	Erik E. Fair	ucbvax!fair	fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu