Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!cadre!sean From: sean@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU (Sean McLinden) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Whither chargeback policies? Message-ID: <1129@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> Date: 21 Apr 88 18:29:06 GMT References: <794@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> Reply-To: sean@cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu.UUCP (Sean McLinden) Organization: Decision Systems Lab., Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA. Lines: 47 The biggest single argument against chargeback is that is does NOT take into account the value of the network as a substrate for some greater activity. In terms of the volume of business on the DARPA side of the Internet, I suspect that the biggest users, who are, most probably, the biggest contributors to the evolution of the network, are hardly the deepest pockets, and this includes the many universities and research groups that provide software such as the recent TCP/IP updates to Unix, without charge to the users. There is no fair way to measure this contribution (unless we put it to a quorum), or to predict from where will the next significant contribution come. If the network were an end in and of itself, a chargeback policy based on usage would be quiet reasonable. Under a Libertarian system of government it would also make sense, but many other programs aimed at a greater good are not billed on the basis of usage but on the basis that the good to society represents a greater "fairness" than billing on a usage basis. A previous author, in criticizing my highway analogy, actually argued in favor of my point by noting that toll road was less utilized than the alternate routes which were subsidized by taxation rather than usage tax (except indirectly, by gasoline taxes). The arguement here is that there is a societal good which justifies the expenditure of public funds without regard to direct usage. In the sense that this benefits all of us, independent of our ability to pay, one might argue that it is more benevolent than a system which is more "fair". The problem with many policy-makers is that they love to deal with numbers and go to great pains to quantitize any problem so that they can deal with it using well established (if unimaginative), numeric systems. There is a qualitative issue here, which deals with our economic and technologic competitive edge as a function of information sharing, which cannot easily be reduced to a scalar. We have an obligation to study that thoroughly before we institute the policies of some pencil pusher who needs to show some federal budgeteer a black line that puts them in the clear and forces the rest of us to deal within the limits of short sighted policy-makers. I agree that a study should be done, but participants should not be limited solely to knife wiedling accountants and the clever technocrats who have demonstrated that we have the technology to institute such as system as packet accounting, but also to those people who are able to see how our future as developers and users of this technology and as a nation, would be best served. Sean McLinden Decision Systems Laboratory University of Pittsburgh