Further discussion on this topic should take place on LSTSRV-L only, to avoid cross-posting. I am afraid that Jose-Maria's points 2 and 3 are quite valid, ie the LISTSERV backbone is ONE international entity, *not* the concatenation of TWO independent entities, one being EARN and the other non-EARN. That is, if one of the backbone servers misbehaves, for whatever reason, both EARN and non-EARN sites are affected; whether that "broken" server is on EARN or not is irrelevant, it needs to be repaired or removed from the backbone in order to solve the problem. The decision therefore CANNOT be taken ONLY by the political entity to which the server belongs, and I'm afraid that this is something the politicians cannot accept because, unfortunately, their technical understanding of LISTSERV and their knowledge of the history of the product is not sufficient to give them a clear picture of how these things work and how they are organized. The net result of this is that, unfortunately, plan #2 as it is now is not viable. The first thing that EARN would do when they become responsible for the maintenance of the EARN part of PEERS NAMES would be to put FRMOP11 back on the backbone, and the first thing that a non-negligible number of non-EARN sites would do is to complain that this is unacceptable. Clearly a final, binary decision would have to be made, and plan #2 does not define how. Without an extra clause to clarify this point, plan #2 is therefore bound to fail. Does anybody have anything to propose? The only technically feasible plan I can think of is to have one unique person on the network making all these decisions, which has worked very well in the past but which seems to upset EARN considerably. Eric