Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!killer!ames!husc6!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!webber
From: webber@aramis.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: "NNTP has had a number of very bad effects on the net..."
Message-ID: 
Date: 10 Jul 88 01:22:41 GMT
References:  <2263@epimass.EPI.COM>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 87

In article <2263@epimass.EPI.COM>, jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes:
< Bob Webber's gripes about NNTP:
< <   1) It has greatly decreased the response time of the net.
< It's a matter of taste whether that is a problem.

Yes.  The whole question of what is ``bad'' and what is ``good'' could
be said to be a ``matter of taste.''  But so what?

< <  This has encouraged the use of news for idle chat rather than using mail
< <  for same.
< The main reason here is because of the unreliability of mail these
< days, not NNTP.

Mail is very reliable these days.   If you send out a message and it doesn't
make it and then you resend it, it won't make it again.  What could be more
reliable?  What the net is in desperate need of is a list of ``dumb'' mail
sites that are willing to send messages where the sender asks rather
than play their own silly games.  [Incidently, rutgers is, alas, not such
a site -- personally, I would rather that a site cut back on its connections
when it finds too much mail going thru it rather than screwing around
with the mail address (of course, this should be balanced with the
load of mail the site itself generates -- certainly any site should be
willing to handle as much mail of other peoples as it handles for its
own (counting both local recieve and local send as being mail service
for ``its own.'').]

< <   2) It messes up the economics of the net.  Cross country communications
< <      costs are now no-charge for a number of sites.
< 
< That's been true all along; quite a few of the long-distance net
< hops were always somebody's fixed-cost leased line.

If I add a fixed-cost leased line to site X, I have added just one
such connection to the overall cost-flow of the net.  If I add myself
to something like nsfnet, it is equivalent to setting up hundreds of
direct connect fixed-cost leased lines simultaneously.  The difference
is orders of magnitude.

< all available bandwidth.  To the extent that mailing lists become
< newsgroups, NNTP should decrease traffic.

Hardly.  Most arpanet mailing lists are near dead because of the nuisance
of managing them (both for reader and sender).  Converting them to newsgroups
just gave them new life and greatly increased their volume.  Replacing them
with newsgroups might have been interesting at a time when newsgroup creation
was more liberal, but maintaining backward compatibility with their mail
connections has been silly and led to many misunderstandings on the net.

< <   3) It has increased the centralization of the backbone.
< This is flat-out wrong.  It LESSENS the clout of the backbone.  Most
< long distance NNTP traffic is by NON-backbone machines.  Every single
< site on the official US backbone, other than UUNET (which really is vital),
< could quit, and thanks to NNTP, we could rebuild the whole thing in a
< couple of weeks (except for a few sparsely populated areas), since low-cost
< replacements can quickly be found.  Whiny backbone admins can now
< politely be told, "Thank you for all the contributions you've made in
< the past, but if you can no longer tolerate the problems, the net can
< get along just fine without you."

This is FLAT-OUT WRONG.  The problem has NEVER been that the backbone
had any REAL clout as far as being ``needed'' for the net.  The problem
is that sites run by administrative types orient themselves behind authority
figures and invest anyone claiming to be responsible leadership with
de facto control.  NNTP traffic increases the number of such sites controlling
communications of the net.  Just at a time when individual home users could
afford to be news and mail trafficers, you have all these major institutions
saying ``Don't bother, we can use arpanet or nsfnet or what have you and
ship it all around cheaper and faster than you could ever hope to.''  


<  For example, rutgers,...decwrl, decvax all interconnect
< <      over non-charge communication networks.  Meaning that most of the
< <      link restrictions on the US backbone map are software.
< 
< The US backbone map has almost nothing to do with the way news
< actually flows within the US.

On this we agree.

------ BOB (webber@athos.rutgers.edu ; rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!webber)

< 	If you leave your fate in the hands of the gods, don't be 
< 	surprised if they have a few grins at your expense.	- Tom Robbins

Who cares that it was Tom Robbins who said it?  I WANT A FULL CITATION!
WHAT BOOK!  Who knows, if he said something as interesting as this, he
might have something else worth reading to say.