Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ANDREW.CMU.EDU!ms6b+
From: ms6b+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Marvin Sirbu)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: billing for use
Message-ID: <UZs3N1200ioEM8f4Ma@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 19 Feb 90 18:09:05 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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One of the positive benefits of billing for use is that it provides an incentivefor users to invest in conservation.  The problem is similar to the problem
of apartment renters for whom energy costs are bundled:  they have no incentive
to close their windows, or turn down their thermostat.

Consider for example FTP of large files.  The published FTP spec has provisions
for a checkpointing procedure so that an FTP can be restarted if the
connection breaks, thus saving retransmission from the beginning of a large
tar file.  Yet virtually no FTP implementations in use today use this
facility.  If users were charged per packet, they could cost justify spending
money on a commercial implementation of FTP which did implement checkpointing.
Our campus LAN doesn't bill for usage, and one user was found backing up
a 10 MB file--in its entirety--to a server every few seconds.  If there were
a charge for usage, he would have spent the few hours
it would have taken to write a procedure
for saving incremental changes rather than the entire file.  Without usage
charges, there was no incentive to spend five minutes on the problem.

I agree with Alex that we must first decide what POLICY we want to have
and then design a pricing strategy accordingly.  I believe, however, that
one element of such a policy must be to provide an incentive for users
to spend effort|dollars on software which is conserving of network resources
when such expenditures are cheaper than adding to network capacity.


Marvin Sirbu
CMU