On Nov 13, 5:17pm, Barry Shein wrote:
}
} Perhaps as an exercise we should take a month, stop all spam-related
} topics, and discuss how the global postal system or telephone system
} should work.
I would be interested to have you expand upon your analogy to the
postal and telephone systems. In particular, both of these came
into existence as monopolies, and it has only been a relatively
recent development (as compared to the long history of the postal
and telephone services) that there is a competitive economy in
either market.
In both cases there was a high initial barrier to entry, and for the
postal system the need to transport tangible objects remains one.
What mechanism do you propose that would either establish similar
barriers for Internet transactions, or bring a similar economy into
existence even though such barriers do not exist? Who becomes the
regional monopoly with the power to set prices and refuse service
to those who don't pay?
There used to be such a barrier to joining the Internet. One had to
have at least one willing peer, and one had to pay for the dedicated
data connection to one's peers, and the peers had to agree on the
traffic they'd carry. Seems to me that was the period during which
a different decision could have been made, to make the entire system
closed to those who didn't pay the "postage" for the data that they
emitted, whatever that data might be. Is it really not too late?
If not, is it really a net benefit to go back? (Yes, pun intended.)
Certainly one could establish a new monopoly, and some people might
even pay to use it because of its exclusivity. (I seem to recall some
startups attempting exactly that in the last few years, but I don't
know what happened to them.) Is there a passenger railway system
anywhere in the world that survives without government subsidy? Is it
in a region where people have private cars and access to cheap fuel
and good roads and parking?
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