Bernie, thanks for a much better written synopsis of Internet history and
alternate theories of reality than I could have come up with on my own.
> Places like Amazon and buy.com and friends would trivially pay the minor
> transaction costs to run their web sites [although they might thing twice
> about the fancy graphics].
If anything, I think a transaction pricing model might have sped up the
development of commercial traffic on the net, and the acceptable use
guidelines might have gotten modified quicker, though perhaps it wasn't
large-scale viable until the killer app, the web, came along.
> Businesses were *dieing* to get connected and they would surely have
> connected right up as soon as it became legal.
Which might have happened a bit faster, since the backbones would have
seen commercial transaction billing as a revenue source.
> And think about some other things: if sysops got *billed* for their net
> usage, do you think there'd be many open/anonymous servers misconfigured
> out there? And so in addition to [IMO] doing a lot to cut down on spam,
> it'd also [again, IMO] have put a BIG crimp in the hacker-attack
> problems.
And just because it's always been that way (even if it hasn't, really),
that's no reason to say that it must forever stay that way. The one
lesson we never seem to learn in the computer industry is that limits
of any kind exist mostly to be exceeded or made archaic, whether that be
640K memory, the IP address space, or in this case the pricing model.
--
Mike Nolan
