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[ NNSquad ] Re: NPR on Internet Usage Charging 

From: Craig Partridge [craig@aland.bbn.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 5:12 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: thank you


I gave an interview on NPR (Bryant Park show) yesterday about the
future of the Internet and also the issue of usage charging.
(Pointer is http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91573504&ft=1&f=1003)
.

If those figures are anywhere _near_ right (even to an order of magnitude _or two_), charging by the byte isn't going to solve the problem. Or, at least, it will solve the problem only by making those applications go away. Nobody is going to pay by-the-byte to download petabytes of information. They simply won't use those services.

Usage-based charges are useful in discouraging the rare user who uses 10x or more capacity than the "average" or "median" user. But if nearly every user wants that much capacity... it's either adapt, watch your customers move to somebody who _did_ adapt, or at best limit _everybody_ in a way that will probably produce bad feelings, dissatisfied customers, and limited growth in an area that should be nearly _un_limited

What is needed, of course, is simply more (and cheaper) capacity. Luckily, Moore's Law seems to still be in operation. Whether network demand will grow faster than Moore's law can keep up with, remains to be seen. All I can say is, in the past whenever there has been substantial demand for something, _somebody_ has found an economical way to deliver it -- and usually gotten rich in the process.