On Sat, Dec 05, 1998 at 03:35:19PM -0500, Barry Shein wrote:
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.
Not at all, Barry. My assertion rests on two things: 1) Routers are too damned busy as it is; too busy, we're told, to run the filters that would keep much of the crap off the net. It's unlikely the money made by packing more customers into a given amount of uplink would outweigh the costs of gathering and processing the information at that fine a granularity. 2) The telcos currently control the local loop, and are pricing that on a flat rate basis, mostly, frame and ATM notwithstanding (there's _still_ a flat cost, somewhere). I don't at all object to "usage-sensitive" pricing, burstable T's and the like; I'm looking at one right now. It's this "slap a byto-meter on it" mentality that demonstrated, I feel, a fundamental misunderstanding of the net. But then, I expect that from telco suits. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Member of the Technical Staff Buy copies of The New Hackers Dictionary. The Suncoast Freenet Give them to all your friends. Tampa Bay, Florida http://www.ccil.org/jargon/ +1 813 790 7592