[9166] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: an Internet buying coop?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Glenn S. Tenney)
Mon Dec 20 00:33:14 1993
Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1993 21:30:34 -0800
To: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein), com-priv@psi.com, communet@nysernet.org,
From: tenney@netcom.com (Glenn S. Tenney)
At 10:53 PM 12/19/93 -0500, Barry Shein wrote:
>What I still don't understand, and I realize I'm a difficult case, is
>why all this obsession over pricing? ...
>I've often said on these lists that the problem, if there is one, with
>the net is not the cost, but the (perception of) value. There are few
>people in this country who are likely to make use of the nets (e.g.
>have PC's and modems and wherewithal) yet can't shell out the
>$20/month or thereabouts for an account. ...
Barry, there is a fallacy in your recent posting (and some previous
postings as well). Sure, there are free nets out there, but the concern is
not that access should be free... but that user access should be
affordable (or free).
The obsession you've been noticing is that full access to the net (ie. with
client software running on my machine) is not yet so affordable.
Certainly, many of us can buy access for a couple of bucks an hour, or a
couple of hundred a month.
But what happens when we want to connect up our whole household, or a
couple of neighbors (ala a coop)? The IP providers who formed the CIX get
up in arms about multiple machines on one paying link. That is where the
obsession is, I believe.
If I want to buy a single link and then resell it to a hundred people
making more than my cost, I can understand it; but if I'm buying a link
that is priced at a specific average bps load (ie. buy a 56kb, but pay for
19.2kb continuous) then the only problem would be if I use more on a
regular basis (obviously, a single user can ftp a lot and increase the load
occaisionally beyond the average).
These are the concerns I'm seeing from these lists... Not that you should
give away userids, but that when someone wants to give away userids they
should be charged the same for their IP access as they would if they did
not give away userids. My comment above about my home applies: If I buy
a single SLIP account, can I wire up my entire home and have a half dozen
systems there all on the net for the same price as just my one machine? If
not, why not? If so, then what difference is it to the IP provider if
those six machines are for my family or for my office building's coop?
---
Glenn Tenney
tenney@netcom.com Amateur radio: AA6ER
(415) 574-3420 Fax: (415) 574-0546
