The name UNIX is a pun on Multics, which is the name of a major predecessor operating system. There are about a dozen hosts that constitute the backbone of the network, keeping transit times low by doing frequent transfers among themselves and with other hosts that they feed. Since these hosts bear much of the burden of the network, their administrators tend to take a strong interest in the state of the network. Most newsgroups can be posted to by anyone on the network. For others, it is necessary to mail a submission to a moderator, who decides whether to post it.
Most moderators just filter out redundant articles, though some make decisions on other grounds.
These newsgroup moderators form another group interested in the state of the network. Each host pays its own telephone bills. The backbone hosts have higher bills than most other hosts due to their long-distance links among themselves. The unit of communication is the news article. Each article is sent by a flooding routing algorithm to all nodes on the network.