Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!wellfleet.com!awaldfog
From: awaldfog@wellfleet.com (Asher Waldfogel)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: RE: Billing for use
Message-ID: <9002021401.AA21815@wellfleet.com>
Date: 2 Feb 90 14:01:13 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 42


	
>I believe that by introducing billing, all mass distribution lists
>will become large "question" boards with no answers.  We will have
>effectively killed off the vast amount of cooperation that goes on
>daily over the Internet.
	
>OK.  So we can't bill the sender.  How about the receipant paying?
>How easy would it then be for some hostile user/host to send a couple
>of gigabytes of information to your host, just so that you got billed
>for it?
	
>I don't believe we can bill by sender or by receiver.  Anyone who
>tries it is just asking for trouble.  If one must recapture costs,
>then use the example given by someone else in this list and impose
>a yearly tax for Internet connection, whether you use it or not.
	
>Hank Nussbacher
>ILAN - Israeli Academic Network

I agree that with the current model of unmoderated lists, it is hard
to adopt a billing policy under which experts answer questions.  But 
I think that magazine subscription is just about the right model for
mailing lists.  I subscribe to the list, and pay for everything that is
sent to me.  I may even pay a subscription which pays for a list editor,
whose responsibility is to keep multi-megabyte diatribes and irrelevant
contributions off the list.  I might also choose to subscribe to an
unmoderated list, and take my chances, or to subscribe to all messages 
shorter than some preset length - with the option to retrieve those messages
later (at my cost) from some archive.

Does this inhibit the exchange of information?  Possibly.  But it might also 
encourage someone to edit and publish old list contributions, which could
answer a large fraction of questions sent in to the list.

I think that intuitively we all agree that the initiator of a message 
transaction bears some responsibility for the costs of fulfilling it -
Vint's "commons" problem - we just need some consensus about who the
initiator really is.  For lists is it the sender or the subscriber?  And
if it is the subscriber, we need some way to bill reverse charges.

Asher Waldfogel