At 09:15 PM 8/5/96 -0400, Duncan Frissell wrote:
At 02:22 PM 8/5/96 -0800, jim bell wrote:
The current question is how to motivate individuals and companies to invest in improvements to the Internet that will benefit everyone. However, I don't think that will be the limiting factor that it may currently appear to be. Due to the nature of the Internet, there is nothing to prevent a company (such as AOL, Compuserve, or other) from building a shadow version of the Internet, through which all of its customer's traffic will pass until it emerges local to its destination.
Note that this is the business model for @HOME which will be handling the heavy lifting for various Internet Over Cable systems around the country.
They'll need it. However, we can assume that POLDCs (Plain Old Long-Distance Companies) will fight back. The easiest thing for them to do would be to offer a single-payment-per-year, unlimited-use LD telephone service for maybe $10 per month or so. If, as various people have suggested, half the cost for LD is billing and customer service, they'll cut their costs by a factor of two and still make money. This would take the wind out of the sails of domestic LD; it is unclear whether foreign LD would follow suit. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com