[2301] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
commercial use and billing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (drw@BOURBAKI.MIT.EDU)
Wed Feb 5 18:11:05 1992
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 92 18:10:40 EST
From: drw@BOURBAKI.MIT.EDU
To: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <9202052208.AA29057@aland.bbn.com> "craig@aland.bbn.com"
From: Craig Partridge <craig@aland.bbn.com>
The key concern that still worries folks is the potential for
counter-productive commercial use (e.g. advertising, junk e-mail, etc.).
It seems like the solution to this is to bill the "originator". (Who
was it who suggested that?) Unfortunately, in a datagram-oriented
environment, this may not be well-defined. (In a connection-oriented
environment, e.g., X.25, this is simpler.)
However, pay-per-use (as in pay-per-packet or call) has the very nasty
feature that it isn't very predictable. For example, my home phone bill
can vary by a factor of 4 per month, and my office bill phone bill varies
by even more. Unpredictable usage causes all sorts of problems because it
is hard to budget. That's why you hear lots of us lobbying for fixed-price
services.
The trouble is that with fixed-price services, it's the smallest users
who get bitten, because they will have the largest peak-to-average
usage ratio. (You really can't survive with less than 9600 baud, even
if you only use it 1 hr/day.)
But the conflict between the organizational desire for budgetable
costs and the economic efficiency of pay-per-use is more interesting.
Are there any known general ways to solve the problem? For instance,
how does BBN handle your office phone? Certainly, the phone company
doesn't provide fixed-price long distance phone lines. How do
companies deal with that?
Dale Worley Dept. of Math., MIT drw@math.mit.edu
--
To renounce war may be an attractive personal moral position, but it
does not commend itself as a national policy because it encourages
others whose own moral positions stress the inevitability and utility
of conflict. -- Allan R. Millet
