On Feb 8, 2004, at 3:02 PM, Dan Lanciani wrote:
In the past we were unable to come up with a value for ``long enough'' which
is in any meaningful way different from ``forever.''
There is a simple business model to solve this problem: long enough == as long as you pay for it. This is the same as any other utility. You get gaz, water & electricity as long as you pay for it.
You are making the standard fallacious assumption that the allocation service/
ISP/whatever is infallible and philanthropic. What happens when the service
goes bankrupt? Don't imagine that the bankruptcy court is going to ignore that
subscription income and just let the customers keep their addresses. What
happens when the service gets greedy and (after enough people are dependent)
raises the rates? You think that can be avoided by contract? That brings us
back to the question of how long a contract is ''long enough?''
This is the exact reason why we should not create a monopoly but foster healthy
competition. If you're not happy with network solution for your DNS name
danlan.com, you can switch to another one. We can have the same model here.
In any case, the actual cost of
maintaining an individual address would be swamped by the costs of billing the
renter for that address.
Billing & recurrent fees is a way to guaranty that the database will be maintainable.
With permanent allocation, the day you get close to exhausting the pool
of new subscribers, the rate of new subscription may not be enough to recover the
cost of maintaining the database.
But even the premise behind your analogy is wrong. A one-time payment does
not in any way imply that ``new comers'' are paying to support previous
customers. The future value of money is well understood. If the cost of
maintaining an address in the database can be expressed as a recurring fee
then it can also be expressed as a one-time fee. A recurring fee is just a
way to hide the true cost from the customer. It also decouples the fee
from the cost of maintaining the database (because the billing and other
administrative overhead will dominate the computation), allowing lots of
wiggle room for little extra expenses. And most people won't even do the
annuity calculation to determine their equivalent up-front cost.
I'm not sure the future value of money is that well understood for infinite length of time...
Actually, I'm sure of the opposite.
- Alain.
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