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. 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)