[11109] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
What is an "Internet reseller"?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Tue Mar 22 04:10:57 1994
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 1994 19:40:46 -0500
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: tenney@netcom.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Glenn S. Tenney's message of Sat, 19 Mar 1994 03:04:29 -0800 <199403191104.DAA06307@netcom9.netcom.com>
Glenn Tenney responding to Marvin Sirbu
>>This is an inevitable result of flat rate pricing. If they priced by
>>usage, the would be encouraging high volume resellers instead of
>>discouraging them.
>
>And if they priced by usage, you wouldn't be using the Internet right now
>and the explosion of net usage wouldn't be happening...
That really depends on what the usage fees might be.
I think Marvin is making an excellent point that a lot of flat-rate
proselytizers are completely missing here. There are two goals being
expressed simultaneously by the same people:
a) Internet has to be flat rate
b) Personal, direct connections (e.g. SLIP/PPP) has to
be low-priced and readily accessible.
The point being raised above by Marvin Sirbu (and others) is that
perhaps these two goals are in direct conflict?
So long as connections are flat-rate then the most rational thing to
do is to sell those lines AND limit or discourage high-volume usage,
since as a provider you're going to have to provide the carriage
(infrastructure, backbone etc) within the same, fixed price; that's
all you get to spend delivering the service, period.
If the market will bear a worst-case price then there's no problem,
but I believe it's reasonable to assume that the market is only
bearing an estimated average-case price.
In that situation you don't encourage end-users to create backdoors
etc, you strongly discourage them (via contracts etc.) And, not
shockingly, that's kinda the situation we have!
If I were a provider and getting a few dollars per month (in bandwidth
costs) for every SLIP connection the next guy down the pipe sold I'd
be crazy *not* to encourage "backdoors".
But apparently that's not the situation.
We have devolved into a situation of bandwidth socialism and the kind
of situation one sees in academic computing centers where there's no
per-use charges so you get lots of "no game playing, no personal use,
only professionally related newsgroups, only people taking bona-fide
computer courses can get accounts" kinds of rules to hold down usage
within the fixed budgeting scheme.
Put simply, when confronted with a resource allocation problem you
always have two choices (at least in theory):
a) Bake more bread
or
b) Organize bread lines
Unfortunately the flat-raters here are merely suggesting new and
unique ways to organize bread lines, occasionally pointing out the
need for bread.
The problem is not the way the bread lines are being run, the problem
is that we need to bake more bread. And the only way at hand to
encourage baking more bread is to let the bakers charge per loaf.
Put yet another way:
Needs, no matter how dire, do not create resources.
-Barry Shein
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