[10453] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: bill to insure flat rate Internet email pricing (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (James Love)
Thu Feb 24 05:45:39 1994
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 1994 23:05:18 -0500 (EST)
From: James Love <love@essential.org>
To: Roger Bohn <Rbohn@ucsd.edu>
Cc: welch@oar.net, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <199402240246.SAA00329@ucsd.edu>
On Wed, 23 Feb 1994, Roger Bohn wrote:
> I sympathize with the goal, but not with the proposal.
>
> Ah, the magic allure of flat rates. It is much simpler just to specify
> (and require by law, if you want to got that far) that the first X
> kilobytes each month is free. Set X high enough that if people are reading
> text, it is a reasonable amouont. (For example 1 megabyte per month works
> out to about 6000 words per day - a hefty amount.)
>
I think this discussion is really off point. Suppose that com-priv
has 5,000 subscribers, and sends out 20 messages a day, or 100,000 total
email messages. Well, if com-priv is a "sender" of email, what does not
cost the listowner? At 1 cent per message (a fraction of the price
charged by several commerical providers), that's $1,000 per day. I say
the list would quickly be dead, killed by psi.
Are we talking about a model where users pay to receive mail, or
where users pay to send mail? List's send mail, lots of mail, to lots of
people. Who is that going to be prices.
I understand from some private communications that Sprint has indicated
in seminars that it believes that metered pricing of email is necessary
in the future. I have also been told that Xerox PARC is developing
models for email pricing. Now tell me again that this is really not
important, as we com-priv subscribers enjoy this free and open discussion
of com-priv.
jamie
----------------------------------------------------------------------
James Love, Taxpayer Assets Project; internet: love@essential.org
P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036; v. 202/387-8030; f. 202/234-5176
12 Church Road, Ardmore, PA 19003; v. 215/658-0880; f. 215/649-4066
----------------------------------------------------------------------
