Eric Hughes writes:
I can imagine that bandwidth in the fibersphere for text transmission will be too cheap to meter, which means that the cost of metering would more than the marginal revenue. In this case, and this is not the near future, there aren't any delivery charges per message.
Suppose 5 billion people are all typing continuously at 300 bps. That's 1.5 Tbps, certainly within the conceivable for a single transmission line. So that's everything everyone in the world types, delivered at flat rate to your computer.
The assumption of scarcity for bandwidth, while true now, may not generalize to the future. We should also not assume that every commons is subject to the tragedy of overuse.
Ah, but the issue of mail overload is _rarely_ caused by what a person can personally type! Rather, by the _forwardings_ of other masses of stuff, written by others. "MAKE.MONEY.FAST" is but the most recent example. Not to mention images, coredumps, etc. (There's a guy on Netcom who, interestingly, sets his "plan" file to be redirected to a file called "/vmunix," which apparently dumps a nearly unending stream of stuff onto one's screen.) If data delivery is free, then what will the service providers (be they PacBell, Yoyodyne Enterprises, or (ugh) the government) do when I choose to take whatever bandwidth I can get and simply _fill_ it. After all, if it's "free" and "unmetered," then I can fill it to capacity (if I can). Or will there be quotas? (If the answer is "No fees, no quotas, use as much as you can," then I maintain it will be relatively easy to continue to flood sites. Flood them worse than anything we've seen so far, in fact. I'll go out on a limb and speculate that cheap delivery makes a fee schedule of some sort _more important_, not less important. Of course, this is up to the service providers; anyone who wishes to provded a free bandwidth link should be free to do so!) I was always skeptical of George Gilder's "fibersphere" assertions, that the fibers will be mostly "dark" because of a shortage of things to say, for example, and that usage would be "too cheap to meter." (Hmmmhh, where have I heard _that_ before?) Things will get much cheaper, that's for sure, but never free. (This is not an ideological statement, but a practical statement, in my view.) I can think of certain malicious persons--and I expect more of them in the future, not fewer--who would mount "denial of service" attacks on sites they didn't like by turning the firehoses of data on them. Of course, I expect sites to be able to refuse delivery without being charged, so clever mail-filtering agents will be essential. TANSTAAFL--There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Link --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."