On 24 Aug 1998, Paul Vixie wrote:
Are you saying that someone should be forced to pay for the privilege of offering something for free to your customers? Things that your customers, who I number among are requesting?
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.
Ok, it hasn't happened yet, and software has been distributed free for quite some time, but let's assume that this is indeed the inevitable. Who pays? Model 1 (current model): a) Recipient pays provider extra for transmission. b) Sender may/may not pay extra for transmission (transit vs. peering) Model 2 (new, shiny, "improved" model): a) Recipient pays sender for download. b) Recipient pays extra for transmission. c) Sender pays provider extra for transmission. Well, wait a minute, doesn't the recipient already normally pay? I have three different providers, BBN being one of them. All bill on the 95th percentile. If I want more data, I pay for the privilege. Works for me. I understand that some providers bill flat-rate. That's their business decision, and may or may not scale. In the case of BBN, I am paying for end to end connectivity to whatever portion of the Internet that happens to be operational at that moment. *I* am already paying for the cost of BBN to get the data from wherever to me. So now under model 2, I am paying twice, not because cdrom.com or wherever wants to charge me extra, but because they are forced to pay for the privilege of sending me data that I requested and am already paying the transmission costs for. The net effect is that the transit provider is double-dipping, and it costs the receiver twice to receive the data. Somehow this doesn't seem to be very attractive to me.
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.
Don't worry, we'll be paying for the commercial release of BIND when you guys start selling it... ;-) I thought the whole idea with this Net thingy was to make bandwidth so cheap it wasn't an issue. This of course is a pipe dream. The real idea from the "pros" seems to go something like: "The idea is to make bandwidth so cheap that it doesn't cost us anything to deliver, but allows us to charge the same or more for." Am I close? /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ Patrick Greenwell (800) 299-1288 v Systems Administrator (925) 377-1212 v NameSecure (925) 377-1414 f \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/