On Sun, 23 Aug 1998, Adrian Chadd wrote:
Again, as just one of hundreds of ideas, imagine that a web crawler house has the choice of updating their database once every 30 days or once every 15 days. Now imagine they make the decision about this in light of the fact they get paid for additional traffic. So now they have an incentive to update their database more frequently. Wow, what a great service for the customer! And as a kicker, they make more money from settlements!
Huh?
Updating more often == legitimate use and more suck traffic. Extended to the extreme: imagine how much sucking traffic they can generate if they wanted to update the database index entries for all 100 million (for example) web sites they index every day. Users would be happy because they would be using a very fresh index. Again, this is just one of many ways to conveniently generate this much sucking traffic.
If they're not, well the network which pulls the most traffic pays up.
The examples provided were counter points to Michael Dillion's transaction based settlement proposal where sucking networks earn money. In the opposite direction, if I am interpreting your proposal correctly, where pushing networks earn money, there are plenty of methods of legitimately GENERATING additional traffic. For example, you could PAY your web hosting clients based on the amount of traffic they generated. This one reversal alone would generate a huge increase. They would have an incentive to use large graphics, more graphics per page, video, sound, continously updating pages, ad nauseum... (Plenty more legitimate ideas where these came from.) Transaction based settlements presume an inbalance in the value of a transaction. There are plenty of ways to generate legitimate traffic in either direction (suck or push) in any amount desired (facilitated in some cases by paying the clients that generate it legitimately). So traffic can be adjusted in the direction of positive revenue depending on the polarity of a particular transaction based settlement scheme. Incentivizing the generation of traffic for traffic's sake results in waste. 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 | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+