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To: geoffrey Wren who wrote (11464)	6/18/2001 4:04:45 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 12823

Hi Geoffrey, Is there a market toll mechanism that can or does make users pay in some proportion to their use of the system? To an extent, yes. But what the US telcos dream of is a metering scheme that would allow them to charge by the minute for Internet usage, just as the European PTTs have done for years. The net result is is make the Internet too expensive for consumers. So, there are plenty of people working on this metering issue. And I sincerely hope they fail. <bg> The dream of the Netheads, as opposed to the Bellheads, remains to have an Internet backbone that is paid for on the basis of bandwidth available not bandwidth consumed. The difference is night and day. Otherwise, the internet will always be slow. Faster alternatives are being developed, eg. private peering, VPNs, private intranets. The public peering points are becoming dumping grounds where "hot potato" routing gets rid of unwanted traffic. So what you suggest is actually happening now. Will the public Internet always be slow? Certainly for the foreseeable future it will be too slow for VoIP, VOD, and other H.323 type applications. There is no motivation on the part of the Tier 1 SPs service this market otherwise. We could tax the user, and then have offsetting tax credits to those whose servers serve the internet. I'm adamantly opposed to such convoluted schemes. The drag on fiscal efficiency from such a scheme is onerous to consider. <g> SPAM - You're right, changing email addresses works to alleviate but not obviate the problem. But what a pain in the klister. I've found I've gotten extremely aggressive with the "delete" button. Seems to work... Do you really think your junk email contains more content? Perhaps we measure that metric differently. Your post contains a few kilobits of data, a picture of Donald Duck may measure in the hundreds of thousands of kilobits. Which has more data content? Best, Ray :)