[10456] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: bill to insure flat rate Internet email pricing (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roger Bohn)
Thu Feb 24 06:02:35 1994
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 1994 18:47:11 -0800
To: welch@oar.net, <love@essential.org>
From: Rbohn@ucsd.edu (Roger Bohn)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
At 1:30 PM 2/23/94 -0500, welch@oar.net wrote:
> An important feature of this is the requirement that the
> Internet service include a FLAT RATE service for electronic mail
> sent to and from non-commercial Internet discussion groups and
> lists.
>
>How exactly are you proposing this be implemented?
(material deleted)
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.)
That way customers don't have to worry about whether site y is on
someone's "approved non-commercial discussion group" list, and carriers
don't have to scan headers (and invade the customer's privacy; do you want
AT&T keeping a list of who you retrieve from?) Based on the discussions a
few months ago, some users would demand the right to get a detailed message
by message bill so that they could dispute it; and to deal with such
things, AT&T would have to log every message. The waste and detailed
administrative rule-making involved in this process would be immense. I
don't want the California PUC to set detailed rules for my Internet access;
I'd still be using a TTY.
Furthermore, this does what it ought to with people who like to retrieve
gigabytes of GIF files from NetNews sites and other pd sites; it makes the
cost of such retrieval a commercial matter between them and their carrier.
I for one do not want my base rates to cover other people who treat
bandwidth as free, even if what they retrieve is "non-commercial". Allow
me to sign up with a carrier who charges per megabyte, please.
Roger Bohn
Rbohn@ucsd.edu
