Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!world!bzs From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk Subject: Re: email's not real Mail, now, is it? Message-ID: Date: 25 Dec 90 03:37:44 GMT References: <6504@crash.cts.com> <1990Dec24.171425.29452@nas.nasa.gov> Sender: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Organization: The World Lines: 92 In-Reply-To: vancleef@nas.nasa.gov's message of 24 Dec 90 17:14:25 GMT Re: Prodigy There's a real challenge ahead in solving the problem of how the economics of telecommunications should work. Here are some models: 1. Pay as you go - Compuserve, The Well, The World, etc all charge usage-sensitive fees, mostly based on connect time, $$/hr. 2. Pay occasionally - Portal and others charge fixed monthly fees. 3. Govt Subsidized - NSFnet, mostly free to end-users but heavily restricted. 4. Commercially Subsidized - Prodigy. Prodigy is actually a mixture of 1, 2 and 4, but let's focus on 4. The intent of the Prodigy folks (IBM & Sears) was to re-create the kind of thing which made free TV and radio possible. You try to get the advertisers to pay for the service and mostly give away the service itself for free. Obviously this hasn't been working and they've been venturing more and more into usage-sensitive charges. Ted Nelson, in his book "Literary Machines" proposes yet another model for his Project Xanadu: "Authors" (that is, people who use storage) pay for that storage but are compensated by people ("audience") who read their stuff. This is not entirely unlike a vanity press. I'm not quite doing this justice, you might want to read the book, but that's the gist of it. Formulating economies for telecommunications is very, very subtle. In my own experience (running The World) I find people are willing to pay a few dollars per month (say, $10-$50 depending on the person) for access to telecommunications. But most people have a point where they begin to get very nervous that "the meter is running", and this point is usually less than their telecommunications satiation point, tho not a whole lot less. Most serious telecom users will spend about 1-2 hours per day at least 5 days per week sorting through news and mail. This is based on very informal observations. That's about 20-40 hours per month. Even at modest charges (say $2/hour) that adds up fast. A challenge for the future of telecommunications is to figure out how to provide this desired level of service (and quality, a whole other issue) within the desired budgets. I'd say 50 hours/month for $25 or less, or about 50c/hour, would be a reasonable goal. Free (to the end-user) would be better. Needless to say, it's hard to provide any sort of quality service at that rate (if that's all you're using for revenues.) A 9600b modem costs about $750. At 50c/hour that would take 1500 hours or almost 3 months of solid, 24-hour/day use to just pay for the modem, let alone the services being accessed and the other equipment, staff etc. It is already becoming true that telecommunications is an enabling technology. Jobs are found via e-mail and news systems, product and other information is readily accessed, people get information critical to their job performance (eg. how to install or deal with some troublesome piece of software). There is also entertainment and political value of course. In the near future we will see more and more people who's living is made via these networks. The net is blind to traditional discriminations based on age, race, sex etc. The 90 year-old grandparent who is brokering office equipment for fortune 500 companies via e-mail/EDI, the 16 year old ghetto kid who is selling access to his jobs database he fastidiously types in from local sources, etc. Within a decade we will talk about people w/o network access as being disenfranchised, we will argue whether it's the society's responsibility to provide free access in the same way we provide access to education and roads etc. This entire transition will be much smoother if we could only understand the economics better. Perhaps, like radio and network television, there are ways to make mere access free. Perhaps not. But I think we need to consider experiments like Prodigy in a much more enlightened ways than to simply write them off as "commercial trash". They may have made some serious errors. I, for one, say better them than me. -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | {xylogics,uunet}!world!bzs | bzs@world.std.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD