[12108] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Net fee-for-service
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason)
Thu May 5 20:59:46 1994
Date: Thu, 5 May 1994 18:42:38 -0400
From: "Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason" <jmm@merit.edu>
To: merit.com-priv@merit.edu
> I am concerned about the general question of commercialization of the
> internet.
Hal Varian and I have written three papers on economic and pricing
issues concerning the Internet. They are available for ftp/gopher/WWW
at gopher.econ.lsa.umich.edu. More generally, use Mosaic or another
WWW client to point at that host and see the "Economics of the
Internet" page, which has lots of links to various materials on this
subject.
A (too terse) summary of one of our main points: not having pricing
that is sensitive to congestion may well "ruin" the net as we know it.
It's a congestible resource, and congestion problems are getting
worse. Users will have to pay (quite possibly their organizations
will pay on their behalf) in $$ or in delay and degraded service. The
quality--and thus the growth and social value--of the net may be much
greater if congestion is priced, rather than using queuing (a la
buying bread in USSR vs. Russia).
This brief capsule is likely to provoke some howls, as it has in
previous incarnations of this discussion. I'm all for the debate, but
feel free to take a look at at least one of the papers before arguing
too strenuously with the one paragraph summary. They are written for
real people, not ivory tower economists.
