Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!NNSC.NSF.NET!craig
From: craig@NNSC.NSF.NET (Craig Partridge)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: refund mechanisms in charging
Message-ID: <8804261909.AA01813@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 26 Apr 88 13:30:10 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 18


Dennis,

    I suspect you can't permit a refund mechanism....

    Take the case of the 14 of 15 megabytes transferred.

    If I know that aborting a connection before all the data requested
has been passed then I can happily set up schemes with my friends to
pad all FTPable files with an extra few megabytes of junk.  Then
we transfer our data, abort while the junk is being transferred,
and apply for a refund.  Voila, free networking....

    I think the implication of this is that you'd have to certify
programs as not able to abuse the charging scheme this way before
you permitted a refund mechanism.

Craig