[203] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Bill S.'s paper
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Schlitt)
Wed Feb 27 11:19:00 1991
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 91 11:03:13 -0500
From: Dan Schlitt <dan@sci.ccny.cuny.edu>
To: com-priv@psi.com
What I see missing in the paper is an articulation of what I thought was one
of PSI's commitments -- Service at a fixed annual fee. In my opinion
metered service with per-packet charging is the wrong way to go and will
seriously impede the growth of internetworking.
It seems to me that this should be faced up front. The "settlement" issue
is one of the driving forces behind packet accounting and it also needs
real attention which will come at this stage only if it is explicitly
mentioned in papers like Bill's.
With this in mind, the government could put its thumb on the scale on
the side of fixed charge service by requiring that the subsidy funds
be devoted to the purchase of this type of service and not be spent on
per-packet charges.
The "commercial" value-added service providers that want to sell
bibliographic data base access and charge on connect time and packet
numbers would be free to do that. But if the educational sector
wanted to buy those services they would have to use another source of
funds.
This sort of policy would keep the subsidy money intended to build the
internetworking infrastructure dedicated to that purpose and not let
it be filtered away toward other, probably worthy, purposes.
/dan
