Re: requiring payment (was spam)
2003-05-28 19:20:33
Since Stef has chimed in here, let me point out one other aspect
of payment systems, one that is more or less the corollary to
his observation about bilateral agreements. It is an
interesting and useful property of the Internet email
environment that we have SMTP servers all over the place, some
of them operated at rather large scale and others operated at
fairly small scale. In general, anyone can send mail to anyone
else.
But, as soon as one institutes either charging schemes or
collections of bilateral agreements, there are huge incentives
to created "hub systems" or "carriers" -- entities whose
business it is to make agreements with lots of local
providers/servers (whom they will come to call "customers") and
bilateral agreements with each other. Without that, everyone
who wants to run a mail server has to either establish bilateral
agreements with everyone else, or a regulatory regime becomes
necessary to make the sequential settlement arrangements work.
Economies of scale, if only in agreement-making, imply few
enough, and large enough, carriers for governments to start
taking interest on a "competition" or "anti-trust" or "consumer
protection" basis. Sorry to be pessimistic about this, but I
think it quickly takes us where we don't want to go.
Quoting Stef, "be careful what you wish for..."
john
--On Wednesday, 28 May, 2003 13:04 -0700 Einar Stefferud
<Steflist(_at_)thor(_dot_)nma(_dot_)com> wrote:
Hello Dave Morris ---
It would be helpful if you would explain how this payment
system of yours might actually work in real life.
Perhaps like TELEX worked before it died, with settlements
between the first posing ISP to the last receiving ISP, with
"settlement" payments spread across all ISPs in between.
Of course this leads to bilateral agreements among al the
thousands of ISPs, and collective agreements among the mass
of global ISPs.
Now, consider the cost of such arrangements, to cover the
frictional costs of just being in business, plus the required
profit margins that accrue to any such massive payment
shuffling.
Everyone here advocating payments do not seem to understand
the overhead costs of collecting and distributing the money.
Be careful of what you wish for! -- You just might get it!
Cheers...\Stef
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