Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!LARRY.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU!philipp
From: philipp@LARRY.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU (Philip Prindeville [CC])
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  Thoughts on why packet accounting will be A Good Thing.
Message-ID: <8804190317.AA05848@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU>
Date: 19 Apr 88 03:17:57 GMT
Sender: uucp@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 30


	4. Charge for higher level services based upon the service
	(eg. charge for local logins at one rate, remote logins at
	another rate, based upon connect time, as other services develop
	their charging units should also develop, distributed data base
	access based upon queries etc.)

As long as we are being open-minded (and perhaps a tad unrealistic),
why not charge on the basis of utility derived from a service?  I know
this is extremely subjective, but I have always been opposed to paying
for a service by the service-unit (say packets or message-units) when
the actual quality can vary tremendously.  Should you pay as much for
network usage when the latency and/or lossage is high?  Or for SYNs
sent to a host that is unreachable because their IMP crashed?

If we all had extremely current, well-behaved TCPs then we wouldn't
have to worry about paying for packets that are redundant (say the
RTT calculation is off and you start retransmitting prematurely).  But
most of us are constrained to use commercial software that is of
varying quality and functionality.

I guess I'm moaning about a problem without presenting any sort of
solution, but I feel it is something to be considered.

As an aside, I would like to see "collect" packets (charged to
destination) for mailing lists.  There is no reason that the people
who provide these enormously useful mailing lists (_not_ soc.singles)
and invest time and resources should be further penalized.  Maybe
FTP clearing houses as well...

-Philip