|In the early days of the internet,  peering made much more sense that it
|does today.  Until fairly recently,  there was something like one 56kb
|(or mabe a T-1) channel from north america to europe,  and similarly
|from NA to Japan & asia.  And lets not talk about Australia.  With that
|type of connectivity. it made a lot of sense for the US & Europe to send
|one copy of a post that would be exploded at the far end.

The more things change, the more they stay the same: the MBONE uses a
form of peering for multicast audio/video.

I'm glad to see that the rest of the Internet has caught up to LISTSERV(R) ;-)

/Pete Weiss