Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> Back to the thought you're holding. Mike's idea won't fly (IMHO),
> because the genie is out of the bottle, and no matter how much you
> might want to overlay a kind of pay-for for this stuff, it won't
> replace what already exists, any more than AOL switching from unlimited
> time to metered time won't happen voluntarily -- AOL has to REPLACE it,
> and since they own the service, they can. Users won't voluntarily give
> up something they see as free, problems and all, for something they pay
> for. And there's no central authority to force them to take on the new
> system.
So maybe the focus has to be on inter-ISP pricing, and let the ISP's
continue to offer prix fixe, at least until the next time they all revise
their pricing models. (Every 2-3 years, it seems.)
As I said up front, I'm philosophising online here, in search of a way to
put the Internet on a more stable economic basis and deal with certain
problems IMHO caused by the current economic structure.
If the best arguments against me are that it won't fly "because that's not
the way things work and people won't accept it", and not that my idea
isn't technologically feasible, then I would remind folks that there are
countless ideas that received that same judgement up front. IBM turned
down the photocopy machine because they decided it wouldn't sell,
so the inventor went on to start up a little company called Xerox.
A question for those who know more than I (probably most of the subscribers
to this list): What percentage of spammers have their own IP connection
versus sending from some ISP? One flaw in my idea, which I'm rather
surprised nobody has raised yet, is that it won't do much about spammers
who have their own full fledged net connection.
> for them to work. that's why filtering issues are such a key, and why
> spamblocking is doing it that way. I can't stop spam -- I can decide
> not ot take it on my site.
But filtering is a method doomed to either failure or perpetual revision.
It's a game of fox and hounds, and right now the wrong side is winning.
> There are always people willing to blaze trails, whether into new
> technologies, or by doing the research for you.
And in a sense, that's what I'm trying to stimulate here, a different
way of thinking about net structures and pricing, even if a lot of it
is recycled old ideas. Does it represent a major change? Sure. Is
a major change in the cards in the future anyway? Yup, if only because
we're gonna keep running short of bandwidth again and again and out of IP
address space sometime.
And if you want to think about a major change that may happen some time in
the next 10-20 years and affect us all, the people who philosophise about
the future of the phone system predict that they could run COMPLETELY out
of 7 digit numbers in less than 15 years, forcing a shift to 8 or 9 digits
for all of us, worldwide. (I think there are areas in Europe where the
change has already started, but not necessarily for the same reason.)
Just THINK of all the infrastructure and conventions that will upset!
--
Mike Nolan
