That's not quite my recollection. The discussion on the moderator's mailing list said, basically, that there was not (and as far as I know still is not) any mechanism to call for a vote to replace a moderator. Therefore such an election could not take place.
No moderators were in favor of creating such a mechanism. Dissidents were free to create their own group if they didn't like an existing group (comp.dcom.telecom.tech as an alternative to comp.dcom.telecom; misc.health.aids as an alternative to sci.med.aids, of which I was then a co-moderator).
Jack Hamilton California
Qui vit sans folie n'est pas si sage qu'il croit. Francois VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, that is true also (about no mechanism in place to handle it); they did not quite know what to do with me. I was not voted 'in'; therefore could not be voted 'out'; I was just doing my thing and they could either read it or reject it. But there was also that sticky problem of what to do about 'newsgroups' which were never really part of the original Usenet News scheme to begin with, such as telecom. So many of these names in the past have been used interchangeably, i.e. 'Usenet', 'internet', 'Internet', 'the Web', and so forth. Just like the (now rarely used) 'Gopher', 'Archie', 'Veronica', 'Telnet' 'mail', 'Mail', 'mailx', 'elm', 'FTP', and many others, they are all _transport mechanisms_ which do a lot the same thing: copy data and information from one site to another site, but they are separate and distinct functions. Quite a few years ago, someone once asked me 'how does Usenet work'? And I said what is certainly an over simplification and has been changed some since I said it: "Usenet is like a big mailbox with universal read/write priviledges. Everyone can write to it, everyone can read from it, but otherwise the contents move around a lot like any other mail, but instead of it being chmod the owner only; it is chmod everyone."Then too, as we know there can be but one _name_ per newsgroup; they have to be _unique_; there can be only _one_ comp.dcom.telecom and it was (still is, perhaps?) that choice bit of real-estate which many of them desired in 1993. Again, I am reminded of the sale of WNIB: it was parked smack-dab in the middle of the spectrum, at 96.9 and 97.1 FM from a time when the space was so wide open. Sonia and Bill Florian paid _nothing_ for a license to be there, and virtually nothing for the transmitter. When the FM band got so full and busy in Chicago there was not a single vacancy anywhere, people were willing to kill to get those frequency allocations. The purchasers did not care about classical music or anything else; all they wanted was _admission_ to the FM spectrum in a good, juicy spot. They agreed that $165 million was a good price to pay Sonia and Bill for 'permission to take over their spot on a crowded spectrum. Imagine an obscene profit like that! A license which cost the paperwork effort to apply for in the late
1950's, a transmitter which cost a few grand to install and maintain over the years, payroll, etc. WNIB went on the air for less than ten thousand dollars in the late 1950's; Sonia and Bill walked out with $165 _million_ dollars at the time of the sale, that was how badly that 96.9 - 97.1 FM spot was wanted. The new owners said to hell with Bach and Beethoven, we want the right to oscillate at 97 megahertz, that's all.Now comes late 1970's and early 1980's: The newsgroup 'arpa.telecom' did just fine. Comes the re-organizaton or 'great renaming' as it was called in the middle 1980's, and 'arpa.telecom' became 'comp.dcom.telecom' but since it came over from ARPA rather than being an entirely created by Usenet thing (they merely assigned us a name is all for technical reasons) and everyone was happy. I guess it never occurred to folks that there might some day be a fight over the _root itself_ and here is this dude, Townson, squatting daintily over the root, telecom, refusing to give up his squat pot, and no legal way to evict him. And Bill Pfieffer, in one of his communications with me in 1996 (he passed on in 1999) was like this: "Whatever you do, make it work right; the way this shakes out is the way things are going to be for many, many years. You best not give up control of the 'root' telecom. If you do, you'll never see it again."
Of course, just as the internet 'fathers' never suspected back in the
1980's nor early 90's how things would 'shake out' over the decade to follow, neither did _I_ expect to become a decrepit, mostly feeble and bitter old man in a decade either. Nor did Sonia Florian come close to imagining she would walk out of WNIB $165 million richer than she walked in. I would never even claim to come close to _their_ stature nor anywhere close to the stature of the men and women who have made the internet what it is (in good times, bad times?) today. That would be the height of dillusions of grandeur on my part if I did. But when the time comes for a transiion here, I do want to be fair about it, and hope people will trust me in that way. PAT]