bill (01/16/83)
The idea of a public subscription network is not a new one. I believe that there are a few companies working on just such for the home computer market. They face many problems -- many that USENET contends with even now. The largest problem is something that USENET has an overabundance of -- interesting news traffic. They find it hard to justify without any initial network sources to begin with. USENET is a somewhat remarkable event in our modern culture. Now any mere mortal can publish to a limited circulation in a matter of minutes. You could paraphrase Andy Warhol's comment to be " in the future everyone will be able to speak to the world for 1024 words or so ". There are many parts of USENET that need revision before it could become a commercial service -- perhaps so much that it might as well be called something else ( COMMNET ? ) . Could it be possible that COMMNET could just be a commercial sector USENET, living in parallel to USENET with no crossover points ? I think that USENET in it's liberal form would be hard to fit into a commercial corporation that was not a service company. If this proposed service company just provided a "cheap" means of telecommunications, it legally and otherwise would be indistinguishable from SPRINT or MCI . If it were a store and forward network, theoretically it might be possible to sue or bring criminal charges (say pornography for lavender net.jokes, or slander) using the physical record as a basis, but I suppose that clever use of public key encryption and/or special licensing might reduce this risk. The problem with a service company would be that it would tend to evolve to be more than a service company, along the lines of Dr. Frankenstien's monster. Those that suggest that a service company could be created to be directly responsible to the wishes of the haphazard community of USENET must really be net.joking ! That is like trying to hold an unbiased poll on this net, quite impossible (remember the name the net game a year ago ? ) . There is no way in it's current free form that USENET could control a given company. If you were to formalize it to the degree that it could be taken seriously, it probably would not be USENET any more ( we could call it USE-NYET ). I believe that it would be hard but you could evolve a service only organization independent of USENET soley to reduce communications costs. It could use it's own unique protocols to speed data communication, and provide a bonded confidential treatment of data either uni or multicast to different sites. The store and forward machines would not know about USENET or any other kind of format. For that matter they might be very simple microcomputers whose sole aim would be shuttling data the cheapest and fastest way from source to destination. Since there are several companies that provide a similar service ( e.g. digital communications, backbone X.25 networks, etc) one might approach them with the idea. The main idea here is to separate the concepts of data communications and content dependent services -- no one really cares how the bits get there. If one insists on providing more services than communications, then they should sell them thru some software house, because network control will be a very sticky subject to get by with a USENET company. It just isn't as easy as putting together another BBN . Bill Jolitz.