🚀 go-pugleaf

news@orcenl.uucp writes:
   One thing we (as a mail/news community) can and do decide about is how
   we organize our selves,

You are certainly free to organize your internal community in any way
you see fit.  However, if certain individual sites - which just
happen, quite coincidentally, to fall within the geographic borders of
Europe - choose to set themselves up as some other sort of community,
because they feel they have found a better internal community
structure, then they constitute another distinct community.  It seems
to me that EUNet has no business "blacklisting" those sites from using
their own links at their own cost for the purpose of pushing mail
around.  This is apparently so because of the way that EUNet controls
(that is, restricts) registration of European UUCP sites.

I have not yet seen anyone from EUNet refute the premise that mail
traversing the uunet->mcvax link will be dropped or returned if EITHER
the source or intended destination is an unregistered site.  (This is
my understanding; if it is genuinely incorrect, please enlighten me.)
By itself, this would be fine.  But in combination with EUNet's
control over who gets registered, and specifically refusing to
register anyone who does not pay the EUNet fees, this constitutes a
fairly clear case of "blacklisting" such an external community.

If EUNet would allow open registration but then implemented schemes
whereby non-EUNet mail would avoid routing over EUNet-sponsored links,
the problem would be gone.  They would justly retain control over what
may pass on their links, while allowing general UUCP host registration.

   and I really don't think that very many of us would
   like an organization like the U.S.-style.

Perhaps not very many would.  "Not very many" != "none."  There is no
reason for that non-empty set of sites to be blacklisted by EUNet
merely because they have an alternative and non-interfering community
structure.

   It IS a matter of costs, all this is NOT free, and even though some US
   sites announce that any European (or other) site can have some of their CPU
   cycles, disk space and organization, please remeber that this IS paied by
   someone; CPU cycles, disk space and manpower are NOT free.

I submit that, from my perspective, as a sysadmin in the US offering
such services to any European site which cares to ask, the cost is
indeed zero.  I would spend almost no time writing to
hostmaster@sri-nic.arpa registering a domain; I would spend even less
time adding configuration details to my Systems, paths, and
sendmail.cf files; the disc space exists and is underutilized (nearly
100Mbytes sits largely idle); the system in question actually exists
specifically for the sake of UUCP connectivity.  The incremental cost
of such new connections is indeed zero.

--Karl