[Sent to you alone as I am unable to post to the list]
On Sun, 30 Mar 2003, Leo Bicknell wrote: > I find this argument interesting, because a lot of people seem to > share your feeling that the ISP can, in the terms of service, allow > or disallow specific uses. Please note that in the absence of overriding law, these are civil contracts covered by civil law (at least in the US - YMMV overseas), and the ISP *absolutely* can set arbitrary and even stupid restrictions on how their service is used. <several excellent examples of pay-for-use elided> > If ISP's keep imposing these overly restrictive terms of service > eventually the people will revolt. The government will come in > and make a huge mess of the industry, but probably "fix" things > from the consumer point of view. ISP's would be wise to look at > what the other utilities do, and make their service be the dropping > off of an Ethernet port on a billing device (eg, meter) and simply > bill per bit. Obviously, you are describing the model used universally in the early days of connectivity scarcity. Since the industry is ruled by supply and demand rules, as the supply expanded, the price dropped - eventually to the point where the appearance of "unlimited use" was a viable marketing tool. As the pipes feeding the ISPs got bigger and bigger, the industry moved to selling the trivial-response-time-decreases, via the "sale" of more bandwidth - at no time did any of the ISPs expect that the 1.5m "unlimited" customer would use that 1.5m continually. On the flip side, the vast majority of consumers understood very little of the technology other than 1.5m meant less waiting for that daily M$ Critical Security Patch, resulting in the perpetuation of the cycle. Until Napster, both the ISPs and the consumers were happy with the illusion that oversubscription provided. What we have today is the interesting reversal of conditions: p2p and other ultra-high-use technologies have brought us back to a [relative] state of scarcity in supply, however, the consumer is now conditioned to expect that 1.5U/512D for $49.95, no metering, thank-you-very-much. Switching back to a metered model is now impossible - as we are all aware, a 3 year long satisfied customer will dump you tomorrow if a competitor offers the same [or even degraded] service for $10.00 less. Announcing the move to metering would be a form of instantaneous corporate suicide today. > In the end, I think users would be more happy (plug up whatever > you want, however you want, we don't care!), and I think the ISP's > would make more money. First, more people would plug up more stuff. > Second, they would make revenue off things they don't today. They > outlaw servers because they can't make money on them with $49.95 > a month pricing. Well, if you bill by the bit the guy who runs a > server can pay $50 in usage charges. He has his server, the ISP > has the money to scale their network to support it. We call this > a win-win situation. Third, they could lower the entry point price > for people with low needs. $25 could get you DSL with 1G a month > for grandma and her e-mail, while $100 could get you DSL with 8G > a month for a gamer. The grandma who won't pay $50 today might > pay $25. As an employee at a multinational NSP, I note that this model doesn't sell to ISPs either, at least until you hit DS3s. And we don't want to sell it: the bookeeping nightmare isn't worth the bit charges involved at these low speeds. The same issues apply to the ISPs. > So, while the ISP's may not be doing anything illegal, and in fact > may be having success in passing laws to make what they seem to > want to do even easier, they are being extremely short sighted and > stupid. They may get a couple of good years out of this run, but > eventually the people will be fed up, and fed up people get the > government involved, and the government will fix it in it's usual > bull-in-a-china-shop way, which will be very bad for the ISP, and > hopefully only slightly bad for the consumer. I generally agree with this assessment: eventually, the people will revolt, and *really* screw things up. But until that happens (and then at least there will be a judge somewhere that we can all blame for anything "bad"), we are stuck in the marketing mess we have ourselves created. > Leo Bicknell - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - CCIE 3440 -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
