3. The internet, the medium by which the overwhelming majority the files from the ADS were distributed, has changed in the last 5 years in such a way that public distribution of anything that is illegal is more difficult.

In the old days, when you logged into the internet to download web pages or the latest copies of Internet Explorer, you paid your internet provider for each hour that you were on line. Since modems were quite slow in those days you effectively paid for your internet by the megabyte. The people who provided the content on the internet were NOT charged by the megabyte. They paid a flat ($100,000) start up fee to get connected but after that it was free. But the system has changed. Now the people who upload files to the internet, have to pay for them and those that receive them pay a very small flat rate ($20 - $40 per month). This transfer of costs from the recipients to the providers made the system symmetrical with other industries. The post office charges the company that mails the letter, not the person that receives it. The phone company charges the telemarketing to make the call, not the person which receives the call. What all this means to the ADS is, that the cost of providing my files to the public was slowly transferred from those people to downloaded my files to me and the administrators of the various mirror sites. As our costs rose we simply bit the bullet and kept on working. We found new and creative ways to get cheap bandwidth. But it is ultimately a losing battle and maybe it is not even a battle we should be fighting.

What I am trying to get at here is that there is an awful lot of uploading that is going on. When the cost of the infrastructure was borne by the downloaders, then it wasn't a problem. But as more and more of the cost is transferred to the uploaders we are becoming increasingly shady in how we get our bandwidth. For the most part we have people doing it that are getting a "free ride" from somewhere or are spending political capital to cause the budget keepers form holding up the red flag. But is that really ethical? Do I really want to encourage that kind of behaviors? The answer is that I don't.

For years people came to me and said that my idea to distribute files on the internet was doomed to failure until high speed access came of age. Isn't it ironic that the wide scale distribution of high speed internet access in the last few years has forced changes to the industry that made my idea impractical.

Since you read this far I have something intresting that you can try to wrap your brain around. It is a problem that needs to be solved and maybe you are the one to do it. Ninety percent of people asked will tell you that SPAM is the worst part of having an email account. So Who pays for the bandwidth that spammers use? Since they are doing the uploading of all that email you would think that THEY would be paying for it. But they aren't. There would be much less spam on the net, if those who distribute it actually had to pay for the bandwidth that they use. How can we stop this from happening?

Move on to bonus reason