Presume the existence of a future world where many providers are operating on a global basis and absent the current somewhat US- centric interconnection web. In said world, the cost of serving a given-size customer or ISP connection which contains 90% local traffic and 10% far-distant traffic ("international") is different than serving one which is 10% local and 90% distant traffic. In this situation, one can either ignore the actual cost-per-destination and charge based on an assumed traffic distribution, or one can recover based on some extraction of the actual customer traffic profile. Note that a profile- based method does not have to be "per-byte"; it can be as simple as having spliting current monthly utilization fees into local/international components. The problem with the former case (assumed traffic model and price) is that one risks too conservative a profile (with higher net price and loss of new customers) or too aggressive a profile (with great growth potential but the strong attraction of heavy distant-traffic customers and unrecovered costs). This, btw, is today's model for the vast majority of ISP's; we all arrange for some form of international connectivity and hope that these costs do not dominate our overall infrastructure costs. Of course, this approach only encourages distant-heavy usage applications (e.g. international IP voice/fax) to migrate to profile-insensitive Internet services and is eventually self- correcting. /John