Patrick Greenwell <patrick@namesecure.com> writes:
On 24 Aug 1998, 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.
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.
[...]
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.
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.
But, it looks attractive to me. One of the problems with most of the conceptual schemes posed is that they do not scale to the international links, particularly across the Pacific, where the cost of bandwidth is still very, very dear. As a Korea based ISP, it is very much in my interest to bring content into my network as close to the user as possible. When it enters in the US, I pay the full cost (at ~U$16,000/Mbps for big pipes) to get it across the lake. There is little reason, in the current scheme, for me to transport bozobanner.com's gif adverts across the pacific. My business is also held hostage to any new wiz-bang push technology. And let's not even get started on smurf attacks. Given that my Korea domestic bandwidth costs are orders of magnitude (about 1/160) times lower, my cost basis is extremely sensitive to the amount of total international traffic. If the burden were placed on the content provider, and through him on the requesting user, to pay for that long haul, there would be a clear and present incentive for users to find topologically closer content. I sometimes toy with the idea of redirecting requests to some of the big unsolicited content providers (default MS and Netscape pages, doubleclick, etc.) to a local, unassociated site. Now, if they were somehow settling for their traffic...or even if they created an supported a local mirror, my costs of providing connectivity to them would be much reduced. Also, with a large portion of my international traffic (and every on else's, I presume) being porn, which uses so much bandwidth and has so many auto-popup, unrequested adverts, this type of settlement starts making more and more sense. Most of those sites are for pay, and some of that income should make it back to the network doing the long haul. The argument that my U$10/month dialup customers or U$1850/mo T1 leased line customers should be entirely responsible for paying for this traffic doesn't scale, and is indeed the evil of flat rate schemes taken to an absurd extreme, with those who primarily access local content massively subsidizing the porn freaks using international circuits. This is the fundamental reason for the restricted bandwidth across big ponds, and why no US backbone has any significant bandwidth of their own across the Pacific.
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.
Absolutely. Only the Australians have got anything close to proper, so far.
Don't worry, we'll be paying for the commercial release of BIND when you guys start selling it... ;-)
I sure will.
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."
It is a pipe dream, for the time being. It is not too difficult to see a day when trans-US-continental DS0miles are cheap enough to make US current speed dialup access (and by extention LD phone calls) nearly free. But, of course, by then the bandwidth demands of most users will expand to require something significantly more. And, we are no where near that point in most international paths. -jem John Milburn jem@xpat.com Director - BoraNet jem@bora.net Cell +82 19-220-7035 Tel +82 2-220-7035 Dacom Corporation, Seoul, Korea Fax +82 2-220-0751