[1304] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Usage based pricing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roy Tennant)
Wed Sep 4 07:40:19 1991
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 91 08:48:40 PDT
From: rtennant@library.Berkeley.EDU (Roy Tennant)
To: com-priv@uu.psi.com
>> For one thing, it makes any decision
>> to use the network equate to a decision to spend money. And if you get
>> yelled at for spending money, you just won't use the network.
>
>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. We have about as
much control over our funding support as the average state citizen
does.
Lixia Zhang said that careful thinking is needed about this usage
pricing issue and I could not agree more. Unfortunately, those of
us in the peanut gallery can do all the thinking we want, but it
will be folks like Al Weis who are calling the shots, and believe
me, I am not happy about that.
Roy Tennant
The Library
UC Berkeley
