brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (08/17/86)
I've been on this net for over five years now. I've seen dozens of proposals come and go, I have even made several that I have seen repeated almost word for word each year. All I can say is good luck. Nothing serious will ever come about in the way of Usenet organization by talking about it. Somebody has to do it, and do it so well that people flock to it of their own desire. No vote or plan will achieve this. Central schemes to have master sites which bill charges around to subnodes exist in a few places (Toronto is one) but they won't come about on a grand scale. The secret is that most usenet sites stay on the net because net people sneak the charges past their employers. Surveys have been conducted asking "how much would you pay for usenet services if they cost lots less than your current phone bills?" The answer from most is zero. "If I ever asked my boss to explicitly pay for this stuff, it would all be shut off." A small portion of the net makes the payments willingly, and AT&T (a good sized portion of the net) makes a bundle off of it and gets phone service at cost anyway. A much larger portion of the net gets news via a local call and couldn't pay a dime. While the excuse, "look what's in net.unix-wizards" works for some, these days it would only result in the bill payers cutting off the rest. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
keld@diku.UUCP (Keld J|rn Simonsen) (08/22/86)
Well, fellow Americans, it can be done! The European counterpart to USENET, EUnet (R) features an evenly distributed cost of the news amongst all sites participating. We have one central site 'mcvax' in Amsterdam, The Netherlands connected to several American, Australian and Asian sites, and a backbone in each country in Europe distributing the news further. The national bacbones are billed by mcvax on the size of the traffic and the number of news sites in the country. The national backbones then bill the news sites in the country. This scheme goes for mail too. The cost per site for news is typically about USD 1000 per year. This excludes most soapbox groups though. I think this is a very reasonable price regarding the traffic (about 10 Mb per month) and that it includes all telephone and other transmission charges. Many other nets charge from USD 5000 a year just to connect to them! So my boss does not worry about that. But maybe he should worry about all the time spent by employees on reading that stuff! So good luck, Americans! Keld J|rn Simonsen, Univ. of Copenhagen, Denmark keld@diku.uucp EUnet is a registered trade mark of EUUG in Denmark and other countries.