dww@stl.UUCP (David Wright) (10/31/85)
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.
gds@mit-eddie.UUCP (Greg Skinner) (11/02/85)
If all the readers and posters of news were to contribute a small % of
their salary, or even contribute some of their salary according to how
much of USENET they actually use, I think the backbones would be able to
alleviate the cost of news somewhat. This doesn't handle the postings
from other sites so much -- let's say utzoo has few readers and posters
and the contributions from them do not offset the cost of shipping other
sites' news around by much. I don't want to get into a debate of sites
charging other sites to ship their news around, because it is true that
this is an accounting nightmare. But it might be possible for sites to
help contribute to backbones' overload by calling the backbones for
non-technical groups they want to receive and send, with business as
usual for technical groups.
--
It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from goin' under.
Greg Skinner (gregbo)
{decvax!genrad, allegra, ihnp4}!mit-eddie!gds
gds@mit-eddie.mit.edujerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre) (11/05/85)
> 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. Just feeding news to several other sites does not make a site a "backbone". A backbone site is (in general) one which sends and receives news from a geographically remote site. The costs incurred by backbone sites are generally caused by long distance transmission costs (usually phone calls). There are only a few sites that carry news across the USA. Without these sites news posted in one area of the USA would have little chance of ever reaching the bulk of the news systems. To put it in European terms which you are probably more familiar with, it is not the cost of ukc sending news to stl, it is the cost of mcvax sending news to ukc. And even more importantly it is the cost of mcvax getting news from seismo. You derive benefit from the seismo to mcvax link even though you are not directly connected to either. I am told that the seismo to mcvax costs are distributed out to the other European sites. In the USA there is no mechanism for distributing the backbone costs to the rest of the network. It is a non-trivial matter to even figure out how such charges would be calculated. The USA backbone link does not have the simple star structure that Europe has. Any place that the news flows in both directions the decision of who pays would be debatable. Take a look at the map of backbone sites (posted in mod.map). Try figuring out how much of the cbosgd to clyde link that I (oliveb) should pay for. Obviously I get some articles by that path but I suspect that if it went away I wouldn't notice. So you see it is not as simple as "feed" sites and "leaf" sites. The cost of a "feed" site sending news to a local "leaf" site is generally too small to worry about. The bulk of the cost is in a few cross country links. Jerry Aguirre @ Olivetti ATC {hplabs|fortune|idi|ihnp4|tolerant|allegra|tymix|olhqma}!oliveb!jerry