[2308] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: commercial use and billing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (sean mclinden)
Thu Feb 6 07:56:46 1992
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 92 07:40:30 -0500
From: sean@dsl.pitt.edu (sean mclinden)
To: com-priv@psi.com, drw@BOURBAKI.MIT.EDU
To my mind the biggest single disadvantage to pay-per-use is that it is
essentially economic censorship, that is, your ability to access information
is limited by the depth of your pocket. The telephone system is not a
perfect analogy since, in most cases, you can pre-determine the value (or
worth) of any individual call. But networks utilize different metaphors.
How do you determine the value of an arbitrary volume of information until
you have consumed it (at some expense to you). In that sense it is more
like a cigarette in that once you have lighted it, it consumes itself
whether you actually use it or not.
The solution to this problem, if there is one, may not be as easy as
it sounds. Newsgroup approaches have been to use moderated lists (re-
quiring someone be the moderator), informative Subject: lines, e.g.
"Public domain CALS software", hierarchies (separate the wizards from
the neophytes and the sources from the comments). Many of these rely
on convention which is not enforceable and not uniform. I can't tell
you how many times I found good information in a message with a lackluster
Subject: line and how many times messages with real eye-catching Subject:
lines have nothing in them.
All of this is to argue that before we settle on a pricing scheme that
*assumes* (as most people do) that you know *a priori* how much of the
resources you will be consuming, we should consider researching the
technical and social issues to determine what are appropriate funding
mechanisms based on the utility of the system. I don't believe that
enough has been done in this area which is surprising given that a
few years ago NSF (and this is *NOT* NSF bashing) was interested in
things like "The National Collaboratory" and social issues in information
management. The problem, in part, may be that it is much easier to
imagine funding a project that results in software rather than ideas.
I know that Steve's division and Larry Rosenberg's were concerned with
social computing usage a few years ago, but I'm not sure what resulted
from that interest.
Sean
