If we meter things so that free content is too expensive to provide, and things like Alta Vista (and Gatekeeper.dec.com for that matter) disappear, will the net still be attractive to newbies? Will ISP customer bases still grow? I'm not sure we're over the hump yet, economically. Right now if all we had for content is the set of self supporting (profitable) sites who could afford to pay metered rates for the packets they emit, it would slow down the growth rate. Most people in the internet business (tier 1 or anyplace else) have got their whole business plan designed around growth. That's how they invest, that's how they expect payback to be paid back, that's where they've put all of their risks. Here in 1996, growth is still more important than fairness (TCP vs. UDP). We can increase fairness using smart queuing and other technology tricks that would not have the dramatic (according to me) effect on growth that metering or settlements would have. Let's take the golden eggs as they come out rather than killing the goose.