-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 11:58 AM +0000 on 2/24/02, Graham Lally wrote:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_1838000/1838185.stm For those on the left side of the pond, road pricing has been big issue in Britain, started by libertarian conservatives in the dawn of the Lady Maggy era, and now hijacked by erst-totalitarian socialists in political era when nobody admits to have ever been a Tory. I expect, nonetheless, that if BritGov attempts to do road-pricing with centralized book-entry transactions and GPS transponders, instead of with a simple digital bearer cash toll system, such a system would choke, just like the original proposal to have central automated control of the Bay Area's BART system falls down, even now, 30 years after they tried it originally. If such a top-down, positive control system did work, however, it would probably still create an infrastructure where the adoption of a streaming bearer cash toll structure would so undercut the installed system on transaction cost that it would be cheaper to literally sell the roads to the abutters in the long run -- resulting the the fulfillment of that long-standing libertarian wet-dream, selling the roads. So, totalitarians, and transportation bluenoses and busybodies should be careful of what they wish for. For an example of that, remember what happened to telephony. The industry demanded from the state a Morganized monopoly to "prevent ruinous competition". In exchange for same, the various local political machines controlling the nation-state required universal service to keep the mob from voting them out of office, and to create a larger pool of depositors in the political favor-bank. It took a quite a while, but the creation of a so-called "natural" monopoly eventually backfired on both of them. Universal service required automated switching to prevent requiring a significant percentage of the population (half of all females was the apocryphal statistic) from becoming telephone operators. As a result, electromechanical switching (rotary dial) begat electronic switching (touch-tone; Shockley invented the transistor for the phone company, remember?), which, in turn, begat microprocessor switching and Moore's Law. The resulting exponential drop in the price of switching completely inverted the economies of scale of network operation, changing its very structure from an increasingly larger, more unified hierarchy with exactly one fixed-price circuit-switched route from any two nodes to a massively geodesic network with a combinatorical number of routes between any two nodes, each route with its own possible auction price depending on latency, noise, and lots of other factors. The result was a dramatic reduction in transaction cost, price discovery, market entry, and of course firm size, and ultimately a dramatic increase in the number of phone companies, even vertically integrated ones, and we haven't even started cash-settlement of network bandwidth yet. (The paradox, of course, is that every "information worker" who sits in front of a microcomputer to work these days, sizeably more than half the female population -- even a MacDonald's cashier -- is doing exactly what a turn-of-the-20th-century telephone operator does, reprocessing and routing information from one part of the network to another.) Someday, the same thing will happen to roads, and to electricity, and to natural gas, and to any system requiring the movement of one ostensible commodity from one place to another, including physical goods in the commercial distribution chain, with internet bearer bills of lading and warehouse receipts being traded against instantaneous internet bearer cash settlement -- just like cars paying internet bearer cash to a road's intersection "nodes" as they travel down it. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.0 iQEVAwUBPHj8LsUCGwxmWcHhAQFAmQf/U7Wr1Ih+alpDQNkSkLcSuXpHfvu38Fbn y1C3ZtWT8faP/B1l3ZWMwhYvuYapLu8WT2AxKyvAnDT0S4n4XERyMVPYDFUTM36L jEDQeBjykKmrO2EvBGBbC7pFAKkGLKklchgfvi7a78KgnqG+NyeITx5Mch/Je/Yp 85GhUWyc/AeForj20roEq2XlaWcHzEL/dS8MNHKS72ZrdeKRrKU6Gy7Ar5sjYMJL A0yrlJY/9arM+gNmjG6iHB3UMHo44VQVm7qc2fcQtGhwRA1oyfzWfEmTaOT38eja 9VQmFOKnsq8hPfbMCjgcvfUg/TANMQbEcXL9VFL5Z7ZZslIDHx4ZMw== =aSAi -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
