"Backbone" actually used to mean something, in the days when most of the news moved cross-country and to Europe over dialed telephone calls. It meant that those sites that made the calls were paying big bucks and were hard to replace. At one point when the "backbone" wouldn't carry a newsgroup on drugs, Brian Reid, Gordon Moffett and I created a nationwide "alt backbone" that carried the alt newsgroups (including alt.drugs, the first). The alt backbone was needed for more than a year, til the creation of alt.sex and its subsequent popularity caused a large proportion of the net to pass alt groups around. Nowadays when hundreds of sites on each coast have leased T1 lines that all connect to each other (it's called the Internet), it's not a big deal. Any such site can manage a full news feed to any other such site. These sites can manage ten full news feeds if they want high redundancy or fanout. Even people with 56K leased lines (like toad.com) have no trouble with multiple redundant feeds to get around censorship. There is a single site `backbone' now -- uunet -- which has a stated policy of passing all traffic. (Why not? They get paid by the minute.) It's still important for the thousands of UUCP sites, especially those that are in the boonies, far from local Internet nodes. The idea of the backbone needs to die. Let's solve the real problems and skip the strawmen. John Gilmore gnu@toad.com -- gnu@cygnus.com -- gnu@eff.org I agree it is a very good document, and I envy it - the country I live in doesn't have such a constitution. I just wish you guys would _use_ it. Your assertion about "the freest country" fails because you don't - it would perhaps be true if the system would work according to the constitution. But it does no good to have such a document just rotting away locked up somewhere, after even banning the material it's printed on. //Jyrki Kuoppala, jkp@cs.HUT.FI