Like many Internet settlement schemes, this seems to not make much sense. If a person reads USENET for many years enjoying all of its wisdom, why should he get a free ride? And why should the people who supply that wisdom have to pay to do so? A USENET transaction is presumed to benefit both parties, or else they wouldn't have configured their computers to make that transaction.
Well, the idea wasn't exactly fully formed, and you've taken it in a direction that doesn't match what I was thinking. I am definitely *not* thinking at the granularity of "users." I've heard of users, and their hunger for pornography, MP3s, and pirated copies of Word, but this isn't about them. It's about sites that want to offer USENET to these "users," and the ever-increasing cost to play in the global USENET pool. The topic being discussed is to try to reduce USENET bandwidth. One way to do that is to pass pointers around instead of complete articles. If the USENET distribution system passed pointers to articles around instead of the actual articles themselves, sites could then "self-tune" their spools to the content that their readers (the "users") found interesting (fetch articles from a source that offered to actually spool them), either by pre-fetching or fetching on-demand, but still have access to the "total accumulated wisdom" of USENET - and maybe it wouldn't need to be reposted every week, because sites could also offer value to their "users" on the publishing side by offering to publish their content longer. It would be helpful if that last decision - how much to publish - didn't have global impact the way it does now. When someone injects a copy of Word into the USENET distribution system now, everyone's disk and bandwidth cost is incurred immediately. If a pointer was flooded instead, the upfront cost is less, and article transfer cost is (arguably) able to more closely match a site's level of demand, rather than other sites' willingness to supply. This would have the effect of letting sites with different levels of willingness to expend resources still play in the global USENET game with, in theory, greater access to information. It would, again in theory, allow sites that don't necessarily have the benefit of a lot of resources to spool articles to leverage access to sites that do (thus the comment about the cost being incurred by the publisher, or, more appropriately, those willing to publish). The primary benefit, I think, is that sites that publish poorly - allow a lot of trash to be posted - could do so without poisoning the village green for others. A downstream spool might be able to implement the policy option of choosing not to pre-fetch on a site-by-site basis, rather than having to tune their spool on a group-by-group basis, and the information is all still there. The incentive to publish quality information is that downstream sites are more willing to pre-fetch from you, lowering your bandwidth costs. There are, of course, a thousand devils in the details, like how to chase down an article when you didn't necessarily have it and you didn't necessarily know who might still be offering a copy. Some of those problems in that vein that appeared insurmountable ten years ago might have solutions in current "peer-to-peer" networking technologies (thus the off-hand comment about Napster). Users, in theory, would not really see anything different than they see today. Underneath the covers, though, (a) some articles might take longer to fetch than others, and (b) there'd be less trash distributed globally. I don't envision reducing the hunger of "users" for pornography, MP3s, or pirated copies of Word. Maybe we don't need to incur so much cost transmitting them to and storing them in thousands of sites around the net each week, though. Stephen