Rich Kulawiec wrote:
> I'll also note that at least where I live, the telco (Bell Atfrantic) has
> set rates far in excess of the actual cost of providing the service.
Somewhat irrelevant, since ISP's aren't a monopoly much of anywhere, nor
are the net backbones. And your local telco doesn't set the majority of
long distance rates, which is the transfer of payments system I would model,
they just get a small piece of the action for providing the local loop.
> Just exactly what scarce net resources are those?
Bandwidth and money. Ever price a T-3 net connection? It made my teeth
chatter!
> And if we were able to stop the abuses, would they still be scarce?
I think so. I've seen my own network brought to its knees just with
FTP and web traffic on numerous occasions, and I remember the days when
one could often get FTP tranfer rates in excess of 100Kbytes/second,
on one occasion I got that between Nebraska and Japan!
> I've seen estimates that 40% to 70% of Usenet traffic is spam
Not in the newsgroups I follow, perhaps it is more like 5% there. In other
newsgroups, maybe it is worse. I think a greater problem on USENET is
flaming and other forms of net abuse. (But that's getting off topic.)
I've not seen any estimates of net traffic loads that I have much faith
in, but I would suspect that WWW traffic makes up the largest segment
these days, with things like Realaudio gaining ground fast. (I've seen
what happens when a mere 2000 football fans try to tune in to the Nebraska
realaudio site, it isn't very pretty.)
It seems to me that if spam and other forms of net abuse are to be controlled,
there are only a few basic techniques that will work. Peer pressure doesn't
seem to be working, I'm not sure that there is a viable purely technical
solution, and as far as I can figure that leaves only central control (Ron's
idea) or economic rationality (my idea). Of the two, I'll take economics
over a central authority any time, any where!
It is nice to have a discussion wherein radically different viewpoints can
be aired without resorting to questioning each other's ancestry, though.
--
Mike Nolan
