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this,
and if they had posted it for several months running they would get some
measure of net.recognition for themselves as being the "official"
keeper of the "official" list. But don't delude yourself into
thinking that anything on the net was official in any real way; the
lists served to perpetuate common myths about who was talking about what
where, but that was no guarantee that things actually worked out that
way.
>PROPAGATION
>-----------
In the real old days, when it cost real money to make long distance
phone calls to send netnews around the world, some people were
able to get their management to look the other way when they
racked up multi-thousand dollar phone bills. These people were
called the "backbone cabal", and they had a disproportionate
influence on news traffic because, after all, they were managing
to get someone else to pay for it.
More recently, communications costs were (for many sites) buried in with
a general "internet service". If you wanted to have a disproportionate
influence on news traffic, you needed to be able to beg, borrow, buy or
steal access to great big disk drives (so that you could kee
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