[9114] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: The Buffalo Free-Net / NYSERNet / PSI problems
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Civille)
Fri Dec 17 19:45:19 1993
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1993 19:42:34 -0500 (EST)
From: Richard Civille <rciville@civicnet.org>
Reply-To: Richard Civille <rciville@civicnet.org>
To: com-priv@psi.com
The marginal cost of something refers to the additional cost incurred for
you to do something more than what it is you are already doing. (er, I
think you know what I mean anyway ;-)
On the the Internet, there is a certain amount of capacity that varies
with the traffic at any given point in time: and that capacity is based
on the shared cost and resources of an awful lot of organizations. This
structure benefits PSI and everybody else.
It's long been observed that electronic mail by its nature does not use
additional resources/capacity on the net other than that already
available. It is sent when there is available capacity, making no
additional demand that limits use by others. Mail follows different
economic rules concerning demand as opposed to say, a live video
teleconference on the net, which must use capacity at a specific time --
thus potentially limiting resources to others and creating a bottleneck.
Marty indicates a bottleneck was created by improper use of Buffalo
Freenet users using free dialup capacity around the country that prevented
use by students and faculty of the school, or increased PSI's costs in a
manner they would not otherwise have been. I am curious how he arrived at
his conclusion.
Given the costs of all those "disks whirring" and the total capacity
created as a result, traffic that moves through this capacity in a way
that DOES NOT limit resources to others, really imposes no marginal cost.
I'm not defending Free-Nets and I'm not critising PSI but I'm still really
unclear how the Buffalo Freenet was imposing any marginal cost burden on
PSI. You could as easily argue that NSF subsidizes PSI at some point.
Or, we're all transferring wealth to MacDonalds by eating hamburgers
coming from beef raised on heavily subsidized BLM lands, where the
taxpayers are giving the cattle industry a free ride -- and significantly
reducing MacDonald's costs, thus increasing their profits.
To put it another way: If PSI had chosen to make a charitable
contribution of resources to the Buffalo Freenet anticipating a tax
write-off -- what would they write off?
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Center for Civic Networking Richard Civille
P.O. Box 65272 Washington Director
Washington, DC 20035 rciville@civicnet.org
(202) 362-3831
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