On December 5, 1998 at 14:19 salo@networkcs.com (Tim Salo) wrote:
I suspect that "it's too hard and/or expensive to bill by byte (or kilo-byte or mega-byte)" may become one of the great myths of the Internet.
I agree 100%, it's one of the great "truisms" which has been repeated over and over since the early '80's at least on lists like these. In my experience it rests on largely a moralistic view rather than an economic model. For example, the underlying presumption is that it's somehow "wrong" to charge for the cost of billing (why?), and worse yet to charge cost+profit on just the billing activity (why?) Yet in essence every business which bills customers sells billing services at a profit or they're not in business very long, if you want to look at it like that. I can certainly understand why someone would like to pay only for the actual service or product and not pay for being billed, who wouldn't? But if service+billing, where the billing is a larger percentage than some other billing model, still is competitive (e.g. because it reduces the cost of the service even more) then it's a potential winner. How the underlying charge pie-charts out in terms of cost-factors is really of little concern to the customer if their final deal is better. But that's basically what this "billing costs too much" argument is often trying to say, that increasing the pie-chart slice of billing is unreasonable, independent of how that affects the other slices or the total cost (of course if the rest stays the same then yes, it's probably a loser.) -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@world.std.com | http://www.world.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*