See comments below.... Paul Vixie wrote:
I don't know what he was saying, but I'll say something like it: gatekeeper, wuarchive, cdrom.com, and other archives of free stuff are going to have to do some kind of micropayment scheme -- charge for downloads in other words -- in order to pay their own costs to their providers, in order that those providers are able to pay THEIR costs, in transit they buy or in glass they lease or whatever.
I hate to ask, but are *you* buying into the host transmit charges? As opposed to client request fee's? I am *not* primarily a hosting site, but I don't *even* like that concept. :\ (Not that anyone really cares about my *opinion*, I just felt a need :) CDROM.COM could run PASV, and the "requester" would pay for BW. (DS0m/s ;) Hardly an unfair request. Now, if CDROM.COM has enough sponsers, they could allow traditional FTP... (Changes the origin, and hence fee's) I could even imagine the JAVA app, that sets up the download, popping up a little box that updates a small AD,( oh.. say every 30 seconds...) while you download via FTP from the other window... Of course, that might hurt standard FTP programs, (or *help* them ;) "This download brought to you by....." "Click here for a great deal on .... " Just letting my imagination flow, pardon any obvious shortcomings..
The Internet backbone's growth has been all about barriers to entry and in special deals. People have been buying their provisioning at flat rate or with other subsidies, and reselling it at variable rates to folks who came later or otherwise didn't have access to, or knowledge of, the special deals of the pioneers. Eventually these special deals run out of time, or run out of bandwidth, and a true (cost-driven) market economy is developing.
What we're seeing now is just SO inevitable. -- Paul Vixie La Honda, CA "Many NANOG members have been around <paul@vix.com> longer than most." --Jim Fleming pacbell!vixie!paul (An H.323 GateKeeper for the IPv8 Network)