-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In <199712221801.SAA00366@server.eternity.org>, on 12/22/97 at 01:01 PM, Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> said:
William Geiger <whgiii@invweb.net> writes:
Well IMNSHO hashcahs mail sucks!! It opens up the pandora's box of usage based charges for everything done on the 'net. What will be next? FTP sites charging hashcash for DL's? WebPages charging hashcash per hit? DNS servers charging per lookup? Routers charging per packet?
We already pay usage charges indirectly.
That is to say, in the UK you pay per second phone line charges. It would actually save me money if the net was a bit more responsive. If I was paying packet delivery at guaranteed performance, I would spend less money on the phone charges.
Well this is a UK telco problem not an Internet problem. I most certianly do not wish to see my rates increase in an effort lower yours.
Flat rate charges is nice enough, and the way I would like things to stay, however I tend to think that usage charges would not be as bad as you expect, because it would put competitive pressure on ISPs to provide performance.
I highly doubt it. Currently the going rate in the US is $15-$20/mo unmetered rate for a standard dial-up ppp account. This includes 1 or 2 mail boxes, 5-10Mb quota space, WebServer, NewsServer, POP3 & SMTP servers. This is fairly standard offering but will vary slightly from one ISP to another. This is what the market will bare due to fierce competition in the ISP bussiness. I doubt that switching to a metered rate system will lower prices any and more than likely will *increase* prices. There have been ISP's in the past who have offered metered rate services, they are no longer in business. People have voted with their walets and have overwhelmingly stated that they do not want metered rate services (this is why you hear some on the list talking about "educating" the users).
(My current ISP has truly pitiful performance.)
Get a different ISP. I have switched my webpages and mail accounts to a shell account so I can switch ISP's at will without any problems. - -- - --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html - --------------------------------------------------------------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a-sha1 Charset: cp850 Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000 iQCVAwUBNJ9FiI9Co1n+aLhhAQI3YgP/V886btQ7hRVL1ouJc7kq92ESmveQshEo TEMzFq1lFABiuOd5cfdup92irtKWkIzZFZ+gK0Og9PR7XFVcqd1a4YgB3RKpXCcV 30185A6YtsHnvmK4FgulGNE9kKcTlqjVMLCbQduV+hTxrJy8AWO3fLdvUj70nfdp y0iv1ve+w3A= =lGTl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----