Whether a new inet coop ever evolves will depend on how much
the commercially based systems piss people off in a spiral of
ever more spam and invasion of privacy. I really dont know. I
know there are outfits out there that claim they will respect
your data, and never divulge any of your privacy to anyone
else. But does anyone really believe that?
As soon as that corporation is bought out by another, all of
the previous commitments are history. There is just too much
profit to be made stealing data to identify customers.
The old global BBS system was based on individuals not large
anonymous corporations. If a BBS host sold the names and
addresses of his user base, he knew that he himself would be
faced with ostracism. There was no corporate front to hide
behind. It was _his_ name, and his reputation in the online
world that was at stake.
I dont recall that BBS sysops were in it for the money. I do
recall them using a BBS to promote some vision, political or
religious position. But there was enough competition in this
oddly non-profit sytem to teach sysops not to be too pushy.
You didnt even havta look at their logon screen if you used
the macros in a termcom like {commo}. It wasnt hard to setup a
dos termcom that would go from boot to getting your mail with
no more attention than turning on the pc. For sure the trolls
or the commercially motivated spam wanted to intrude on your
attention on the BBS nets, but it was a lot more difficult
and inconvenient for _them_ to do so.
Another case of the hidden costs of what passes for progress.
At what point, if ever, those hidden costs become onorous
enough to be added up is impossible to say. But if they do,
one of the responses people have always had to abuses by the
management of any system is to unionize.
The combination of commercial sources of spam that clogs the
bandwidth is the clasic overgrazing of the commons.
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