Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: 11 Apr 91 08:22:35 GMT From: Robert J Woodhead Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Per Line Blocking? Message-ID: Organization: Foretune Co., Ltd. Tokyo Japan Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 284, Message 6 of 10 Lines: 55 john@zygot.ati.com (John Higdon) writes: > So come on now, all you per line blocking advocates. Isn't per line > blocking just the new code for "no Caller ID"? Actually, John, maybe we just need to take the idea a little further, in order to come up with a solution that suits everybody! I hereby place the following Solomonic(TM) solution into the Public Domain. The problem with "per line blocking" is that it is all or nothing, and that it places the Phone Company (which wants to sell the "Caller-ID" service to people and companies) at odds with their subscribers (who may not want to give out their numbers). So why not do the following: Phone customers are allowed to set a PRICE at which they are willing to sell their caller-ID information, and Caller-ID customers are allowed to set a price they will PAY for Caller-ID information. Caller-ID is then only provided when the price a CID customer will pay is >= the price asked by the phone customer. If it is, then the phone company charges the Caller-ID customer, delivers the CID info, and credits the phone customer's bill with the fee just charged to the Caller-ID user (less a percentage for the phone company, of course). Both the CID customer and the phone customer can revise the fee they will pay/will demand at any time, for a small fee, of course. There would also be a * code that would say "for the next call, give out my caller-ID for free," that would be useful in certain circumstances (such as when you call a number you "trust" with your caller information). This lets the market make the decisions. Telemarketers will quickly determine how valuable the caller information is to them, and telephone users will be able to set a price on their privacy. And the phone company gets a fee for being the broker in this transaction. You could even go so far as to allow the setting of seperate prices for giving your number to residential or business customers. What's more, the phone company could sell the following information: the price a particular phone number has set for getting it's caller-ID. This is important because if you've set a high price on your caller-ID info, then you are likely to not want telemarketing calls. Probably the best way to structure this is for a telemarketer to buy a list from the phone companuy of all the numbers that have a price < some value (or > some value!). The best way to insure privacy, IMHO, is make it a commodity, such that anyone who wants to invade it has to pay a price (measured in economic units I will dub Saddams). The market will do the rest. Robert J. Woodhead, Biar Games / AnimEigo, Incs. trebor@foretune.co.jp