On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Bruce Hahne wrote:
For every packet you have to determine a packet owner who is responsible for paying. The owner could vary per application, per site, and/or per end user. I could even imagine that responsibility for payment could be split between sender and receiver: 50/50, 90/10, choose your favorite.
If your split isn't 50/50 (in other words settlement free) I guarantee anybody with half a brain will balance out their traffic by hosting the correct type of applications so that you owe them money. Repeated from my earlier post: Transaction based settlements will have the effect of subsidizing one form or another of transactions, in this case either requesting web pages or serving web pages, and clueful providers will act accordingly to maximize revenue by hosting the appropriate applications (for example a web crawler). In fact, TRANSACTION BASED SETTLEMENTS ENCOURAGE WASTE to the point where it should be obvious to the casual observer that anybody reasonably informed would never suggest them. The factors that are the cause of the inherent problem with transactions based settlements are: 1) Either party can end up paying. 2) Transactions are generated by machines. 3) Machines can generate transactions which are either positive flow or negative flow. (web servers vs web crawlers as two simplistic examples). Oh, and before anybody comes up with a simplistic (and flawed) rebuttal such as banning the large web crawlers from settlements, there are plenty of other legitimate automated methods of getting flows in either direction. Mike. +------------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -------------------+ | Mike Leber Direct Internet Connections Voice 408 282 1540 | | Hurricane Electric Web Hosting & Co-location Fax 408 971 3340 | | mleber@he.net http://www.he.net | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+