gam@amdahl.UUCP (G A Moffett) (09/07/85)
Once a group reaches a certain size, it ceases to be practical to make
decisions by consensus (and I am claiming that ``concensus'' was the
old-style method of decision-making on Usenet).
A democracy can make decisions, but since the vote-counting is
so important, the verification of one-person-one-vote becomes
costly (as we are seeing by the 'vote fraud' discussion).
A way of by-passing these political processes, as we are admitting to
ourselves they will not work for Usenet anyway, is to allow a
free marketplace to decide. That is, as I said in my followup
to the ``Doomsday Cometh'' article, that each site decides what it
can carry and the aggregate of those individual decisions will determine
in which direction Usenet will go.
--
Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,cbosgd,hplabs}!amdahl!gam