On Fri, 08 Feb 2002 15:45:51 -0800, Stephen Stuart wrote:

I would argue that what USENET needs is a way for the cost of publication to be incurred by the publisher; storing the data in your own repository (or repositories) while pointers get flooded through the USENET distribution system would give publishers an incentive to do garbage collection that they do not have today.

I don't see the logic of this. If you want access to my content, *I* should pay? Publisher pays would likely reduce the quality of content such that even more of the content would consist of content that benefits the publisher to provide to you rather than content that benefits the reader to read. Think about it. I post a reply to a question in a newgroup. The more intelligent and interesting it is, and the more my reputation makes people want to read my interesting comments, the more I pay. Does that make any sense?

It would almost be like gluing a USENET distribution front-end onto a collection of Napster back-ends.

The net effect of 'publisher pays' would logically be that publishers would have to somehow be compensated for their payments, most likely by including more commercial content. The problem with the current scheme is not so much who pays but what determines the cost, which is purely the volume of content sent. If you start using the web distribution model for news across domains, you should expect to pay for content (either through ads or whatever) just as you do for other content provided by the 'supplier pays' model. DS