🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2164@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk> zmacx07@doc.ic.ac.uk (Simon E Spero) writes:

   Remove the restriction on redistribution. Determine the fixed fee
   by dividing the costs by the number of subscribers dynamically.
   UK{C,NET} would still be getting the same amount of money in, so the news
   keeps rolling. However, subscriber sites can now pass on  news and mail to
   any clients they may have. If they have a yen surplus {hello tcom ;-)} they 
   could do this for free; otherwise, they could ask their clients for a
   contribution. If they charge too much, the client could feed from
   other sites; at the worst, they could take a feed from ukc. 

This is unrealistic and wholly impractical.

1) UKC have to find about quarter of a million pounds each year to
cover their costs. In your scheme, UKC would have to recover this from
whoever connected directly to them. At present, that would mean 10
sites getting annual news/mail bills of 25,000 pounds or so. Who'd
want to pay that kind of money? How many sites would want to have a
direct connection to UKC if that was what it would cost them? Of
course, as direct UKC feeds drop off, the costs for the remaining
feeds increase, the network topology deteriorates and the connectivity
is diminished.

2) Many sites feed news and mail without worrying too much about
billing people. Under your scheme, my site would have to pay 25K to
Kent and then recoup that from our downstream feeds. What do I do if
one chooses not to pay or wants a reduced fee because they don't take
all the newsgroups or just have email? What if a site says that X% of
its news comes from another site, so they'll only pay me for the
100-X% of news that I've sent them? How do I measure or verify this?
Life's too short to worry about this stuff. I'm not a beancounter and
have no desire to become one. Your scheme would force people like me
to count packets and generate bills. That's another nail in the coffin:
I'd stop feeding news to avoid getting involved in beancounting, so
what would my news and mail feeds do then?

   UKC's policy of splitting the costs equally between all UKnet
members seems the fairest and simplest way of doing things - it's also
the easiest to administer so the administrative overheads are kept low.

		Jim