On Sat, 02 June 2001, Jerry Scharf wrote:

It was when multiple connection points came in that traffic differential became an issue. Those requirements were put in when the perceived center of business for the "other ISPs" was local dial connection and bandwidth times distance was used to justify the multiple connections, nationwide networks... Business changed and now the colos are facing the same arguement for being on the opposite side of the spectrum.

In "the early days" UUNET was a net exporter of traffic due to its original business the UUCP/USENET hub and hosting FTP.UU.NET. With USENET, one message went into UUNET, and they broadcast thousands of copies to their UUCP/USENET customers. Likewise, with FTP one copy of X11 was uploaded to ftp.uu.net and thousands of copies were downloaded.