[1299] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Usage based pricing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lixia Zhang)
Sun Sep 1 17:30:47 1991
Date: Sun, 1 Sep 1991 14:30:00 PDT
From: Lixia Zhang <lixia@parc.xerox.com>
Reply-To: lixia@parc.xerox.com
To: rtennant@library.berkeley.edu (Roy Tennant)
Cc: com-priv@uu.psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, 30 Aug 1991 08:48:40 PDT
> >I'm not sure about this money-spending fear. Every phone call costs
> >money, but that does NOT seem to prevent people from making many calls
> >everyday.
> >Every time you turn on a light, you spend money for that, but does
> >that make anyone stay in dark?
>
> So is everyone on this list from a well-funded private company? I
> think not, but sometimes I wonder. I work for a library at a public
> university. We are incredibly well-funded when compared to a
> public library, let alone school libraries which often are zeroed
> out of the budget. Despite our relative good fortune, we are extremely
> strapped for cash. We re-use manila mailing envelopes until there
> is no longer any space on which to write an address. Many of our
> computers are so old that when we can finally find the money to
> replace them we will contact the Smithsonian to explore a possible
> donation. 8-)
>
> Sorry for the long preamble, but this is all to say that if the Internet
> goes to usage pricing you are cutting libraries right out of the game.
> I assume that many other public entities would be in a similar
> situation. We cannot afford to have a potentially large, fluctuating
> charge tacked onto our already meager budget. We cannot raise our
> prices or make more product to recover costs.
I'd like to share my understanding about these issues:
- If the goal is to recover the same amount of revenue, flat-fee or
usage-based or whatever way billing is merely a way to compute who
pays how much share of the total cost.
- Therefore usage-based-billing does NOT mean a larger bill for
everyone.
E.g., A Library with a tight budget might not make extensive use of
teleconference, if that turns to be an expensive service.
E.g., email connection with minimal performance requirements might
become virtually free, if all it uses is otherwise idle resources.
- Therefore, rather than cutting libraries out of the game, I think
a well designed usage-billing system should be able to encourage
^^^^^^
EVERYONE joining the game--people with more money can do more
things, and people with little money can still get some basic
service.
On the other hand, a simple flat-fee-for-all system seems more
likely to leave someone out of the game--the fee is computed to
recover the revenue, independent from how much you have or how
little service you might need (therefore you might have to be out
simply because your budget is just $10 under the threshold).
Lixia
