[1278] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
impact of settlements on provision of free services
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Thu Aug 29 22:12:12 1991
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 91 22:11:51 -0400
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: lixia@parc.xerox.com
Cc: stan@karazm.math.uh.edu, com-priv@uu.psi.com, craig@sics.se
In-Reply-To: Lixia Zhang's message of Thu, 29 Aug 1991 18:05:15 PDT <CMM.0.88.683514315.lixia@parc.xerox.com>
If I came to you (any of you) and said that I will offer you a usage
sensitive billing service which will only cost the same as the
competitor's flat-rate if you keep the line 100% saturated at all
times, you'd have to consider it (I agree there could still be reasons
not to jump at it, but you should have trouble rejecting it out of
hand.)
The primary concern people have about usage-sensitive billing is that
the bean-counters will discover it and cause financial policy to
dictate what's frivolous use and what is not.
To a great extent, we just fought and mostly won that war in computing
in general (I mean, who the heck *needs* 3D drop-shadow animated
icons?)
The fear is of going back to the bad old days of metered, jealously
guarded computing resources where pipe-stress weenies got to kick off
people who dared to waste cycles sending mail messages etc. Now with a
PC or workstation, what you do with your cycles is your business,
pretty much. There's a lot of desire for this model in networking.
Unfortunately, networking is inherently a shared resource, so there's
no such easy way out of the issue.
In the end I think it's going to have to be up to the market to
decide.
I've come to believe there is a market for certain models of
usage-sensitive pricing (perhaps it's the first sign of senility in
cybernia.) But I think people will have to get to vote with their
wallets before we really know. I don't think it's enough to stand up
and declaim to define the market out there, that's just math by
majority vote.
P.S. I also am quite sure there are more choices than usage-sensitive
vs. flat-rate, so much of this discussion is over-trivialized.
-Barry Shein
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