On Sun, 17 Feb 2002, Eliot Lear wrote:
This is the art of content delivery and caching.
Actually _delivery_ is only part of the problem: it assumes the content is available, people know enough about it to be able to decide they want it, and they know where it is and how to request it. Obviously, delivery is an important aspect of the whole process to optimize, since it takes a lot of bandwidth, depending on the type of content. But distributing the meta-information is even harder, and potentially more expensive. The failure of Usenet to effectively do it demonstrates this: because selection is pretty much impossible, you have to deliver everything to a place very near the potential user, even the stuff that is of no interest to any user.
And the nice thing is that depending on which technology you use the person who wants the material closer to the end user pays. If that's the end user, then use a cache with WCCP. If that's the content owner, use a cache with either an HTTP redirect or (Paul, forgive me) a DNS hack, either of which can be tied to the routing system. In either case there is, perhaps, a more explicit economic model than netnews. It's not to say there *isn't* an economic model with netnews. It's just that it doesn't make as much sense as it did (see smb's earlier comment).
In reality, people don't want to think about it. How much am I willing to pay for the privilige of posting this message to NANOG? And you to read it? If we both apply the hourly rate we bill our customers to the time we spend on it (because we could have been doing work that actually pays money instead), probably more than we realize. On the other hand, If I had to cough up some money right here, right now to post this, I probably wouldn't.