[Very little c'punk content, just explaining why the us.* proposal is nothing like a movement towards censorship, but an attempt to resist it] First, you have to understand that nobody has any say over what newsgroups are created on a machine except for the news admin on that machine. Most news admins hand this authority over to Dave Lawrence, the current moderator of news.newgroups.announce, when they install their news software. However, *anybody* can decided to ignore anybody else's decisions on *any* newsgroup and issue a newgroups message (and someone else will usually issue an rmgroup message in response: it's an anarchy, and most of us like it that way). The us.* hierarchy "cabal" idea is *not* to determine what groups will get passed and what ones will not; In fact, the intent is to eliminate "no" votes, passing groups only on the basis of significant interest. If you know any USENET history, you'll know about fiascos like the soc.culture.tibet, soc.culture.macedonia, and soc.religion.islam.ahmadiya proposal -- cases where the newsgroups had a significant amount of interest, but were defeated due to large populations having some sort of grudge or religious/national interest in supressing a point of view. This part of the proposal will, in fact, reduce censorship, preventing organized campaigns from defeating newsgroups, effectively preventing people from discussing their subject on USENET (for the traditional definition of USENET that excludes alt.*). The other part of the proposal, the one which seems to have pushed people's "censorship" kneejerk buttons, is the concept of the "namespace cabal." Again, if you have any knowledge of USENET history, you'll know that there used to be a far stronger cabal than is proposed by the us.* idea: the backbone cabal controlled everything -- they were the news admins at the backbone sites and they had the last word. News admins at other sites listened to them because, well, they were the backbone cabal. They had the connectivity. When the set of newsgroups became too big for news admins to effectively manage them (and the connectivity model changed, there no longer being a real news backbone), a newer system for gaining consensus over newsgroup creation was created. Votes would be taken -- *NOT* on democratic principals or anything of that nature, but simply to gauge interest so that news admins would have some basis on which to approve group creation. Over time, the formula was tweaked in various ways when groups that people thought should never have passed (like the rec.acquaria, sci.acquaria, etc. groups) were created. Still, this is basically the system we have today. As I mentioned above, the current model allows large groups of people to squash newsgroups of interest to smaller (or even equal sized, since the current guidelines require 2/3 majority to pass) groups. THAT is censorship, the tyrany of the majority. There is also another thing that needs fixing. There is a problem with the current USENET namespace management strategy: it is damn near impossible to manage a namepsace by vote. In extreme cases, Dave Lawrence has simply refused to publish the newsgroup creation message, but nobody is very happy with this: it's too much like Dave is censoring the net, and it's wrong to stop the creation of a newsgroup on a subject simply because its proponent insists on a name noone likes. As a USENET volunteer votetaker, I have become embroiled in proposals for groups where a vast number of people wanted a newsgroup but had to wait months, sometimes missing the opportunity to discuss events important to them, because the newsgroup proponent was insisting upon a name that nobody agreed with or because no clear consensus (among users) appeared about the naming of the group. It is the namespace issue that the proposed "cabal" will cover. It's no different than the government refusing to take a vote on where every single book in a public library will end up on the shelves or where each document is stored. Namespace management is simply impossible to do by voting, especially when the "voters" have no understanding of the issues involved. We've squeeked by so far, but only barely -- and as the net grows, it become much more difficult to maintain the current voting scheme. That is why it is absurd to view the "namespace cabal" concept as an attempt to censor a democratic form. It isn't an attempt to censor (it is an attempt to stop censorship), and the current form isn't democratic. Please, before you try to argue this -- check out the facts about the proposal, the history behind it, and the real mechanisms in place before you spout off. -- L. Todd Masco | Bibliobytes books on computer, on any UNIX host with e-mail cactus@bb.com | "Information wants to be free, but authors want to be paid."