Re: draft-ietf-nat-protocol-complications-02.txt

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

> Other than latency, message size, message rate, and the number of
> participants, what is the difference between an AOL chat room and this
> mailing list as exemplified by this thread?

why, the participants, of course.

once people move into chat rooms and make acquaintances there, they
become reluctant to leave.  if changing service providers means they 
must leave, they're less likely to change service providers even
though they get lousy service.

I suspect the "reluctance to leave" is no less true for mailing lists.  
but IETF mailing lists don't require you to use any particular ISP.

still, my point was that the AOL community is more-or-less disjoint
from the community of folks who read IETF documents, and is likely
to remain so.  that's not necessarily a bad thing overall, but it
does imply that IETF will have little effect on the decision-making
habits of AOL subscribers.  if AOL subscribers cared about standards
compliance they would have left AOL long ago.

Keith