🚀 go-pugleaf

In article 
<HisRoyalRadioHigness-3B5F69.09545621062008@news.announcetech.com>,
 John Higdon <HisRoyalRadioHigness@kome.com> wrote:

> > I maintain that the thing that makes the Internet what the vast majority 
> > want is the freely available use of bandwidth to access data on a whim. 
> > Break that, and we're back to the state of data telecommunications in 
> > the days of per-minute metering--only used sparingly, and not by most.
> 
> I couldn't have put it better . . . . If you have to think for one second about the cost of 
> searching or getting a piece of information, then the premiere feature 
> of the Internet is defeated. 
> 
> The pricing structure of telephony has even reached a point where people 
> don't give a second thought to making a transcontinental call. Would we 
> now make people hesitate to simply check their email because they are 
> nearing their "cap"?
> 
> The Internet could be killed very easily by putting a usage-sensitive 
> tall gate on it.

I fully agreement with your sentiments here, but I'd suggest there's a 
bit more to the situation.  Your transatlantic call ties up a few kHz of 
bandwidth, between your and exactly one recipient.  Its real cost, 
however you want to assess it, is indeed very nearly "too small to 
measure, or bill for".  

But if you were able to hook something electronic and automated to that 
same port and have it start exchanging GHz bandwidth signals with very 
large numbers of external recipients, the real costs would at some point 
become not just significant but eventually unsupportable.

Ultimately there has to be a way of paying for the Internet, and somehow 
this will have to have some connection to amount of use.  Obviously 
there are destructive and constructive ways to do this, efficient and 
inefficient ways, fair and unfair ways, and so on.  The problem is to 
find ways that will be reasonably fair, acceptably efficient, and 
adequately constructive for all parties involved in Internet operation 
and in Internet use.  

Leaving Disney, Comcast, and AT&T in charge of finding such a solution 
is, of course, not likely to produce any very acceptable result.