Electricity too cheap to meter!
GE used to use that slogan, in the 1960's, to sell the idea of
nuclear power plants.
It's always suspect, tho not a priori false, and certainly suspect
here, for the very reason we're here; it becomes abused.
I know someone who has phone service with, effectively, a
continent-wide local calling area. (That is, one flat fee per month
(USD 40.00 is what I recall) covers all calls within North America.)
I gather it's new and thus relatively experimental, but people don't do
such things unless they have reason to think they will succeed
commercially.
It's not a fiction. It's a fundamental difference between e-mail
and all those analogies people seem to like so much, a difference
that is in large part why the analogies are flawed.
It's not "fundamentally different", it's mostly different as a matter
of a degree, different costs, which would seem to argue
"fundamentally the same".
It is a fundamental difference in that it is a difference at the
foundation (the "fundament"). It is a quantitative, rather than
qualitative, difference, yes, but it is still fundamental. (Actually,
given how much of the reason it matters is social, I think a good case
could be made that it is a quantitative difference large enough to have
become qualitative. I'm not going to more than mention it, though,
bceause I don't think it really matters whether it's thought of as
qualitative or quantitative: it's drastic enough either way.)
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