[233] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: NREN and Usage Based Billing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Martin Lee Schoffstall)
Thu Feb 28 10:03:26 1991
To: HORN%HYDRA%sdi.polaroid.com@RELAY.CS.NET
Cc: com-priv%psi.com@RELAY.CS.NET
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 28 Feb 91 08:04:00 EST."
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 91 10:46:18 -0500
From: Martin Lee Schoffstall <schoff%psi.com@RELAY.CS.NET>
R,
I agree with you that the best approach is to structure
individual organizational freedom; however, the cards are heavily
stacked against that. Look at Steve Wolfe's message of yesterday
more support of regionals. So you need to establish secondary goals
that provide for those eventualities.
Marty
It is probably best for the NREN policies to avoid any effort to direct the
methods used for accounting or billing. These are areas where any blanket
forcing is more likely to have unwanted side effects than desirable direct
effects.
The better approach is to structure both NREN and NSF policies to maximize the
freedom of individual players to choose their own prefered vendor, and to
encourage easy vendor switching. Then the user preferences will have maximum
impact on the vendors and vendors that do not listen will lose customers. I
suspect that the user distaste for usage based systems will then be sufficient
to either eliminate usage based or structure the usage accounting in an
acceptable manner. Usage based systems do encourage more efficient use of
networks and should result in lower overall costs. Let the end users decide
how to balance billing inconveniences against improved system efficiency.
R Horn horn%hydra@polaroid.com
