Transaction Based Settlements Encourage Waste (was Re: BBN/GTEI)

Mike Leber mleber at he.net
Sat Aug 22 19:20:54 UTC 1998


On Sun, 23 Aug 1998, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> >Again, as just one of hundreds of ideas, imagine that a web crawler house
> >has the choice of updating their database once every 30 days or once every
> >15 days.  Now imagine they make the decision about this in light of the
> >fact they get paid for additional traffic.  So now they have an incentive
> >to update their database more frequently.  Wow, what a great service for
> >the customer!  And as a kicker, they make more money from settlements!
> 
> Huh?

Updating more often == legitimate use and more suck traffic.  Extended to
the extreme: imagine how much sucking traffic they can generate if they
wanted to update the database index entries for all 100 million (for
example) web sites they index every day.  Users would be happy because
they would be using a very fresh index.  Again, this is just one of many
ways to conveniently generate this much sucking traffic.

> If they're not, well the network which pulls the most traffic pays up.

The examples provided were counter points to Michael Dillion's transaction
based settlement proposal where sucking networks earn money.

In the opposite direction, if I am interpreting your proposal correctly,
where pushing networks earn money, there are plenty of methods of
legitimately GENERATING additional traffic.  For example, you could PAY
your web hosting clients based on the amount of traffic they generated.
This one reversal alone would generate a huge increase.  They would have
an incentive to use large graphics, more graphics per page, video, sound,
continously updating pages, ad nauseum...  (Plenty more legitimate ideas
where these came from.) 

Transaction based settlements presume an inbalance in the value of a
transaction. 

There are plenty of ways to generate legitimate traffic in either
direction (suck or push) in any amount desired (facilitated in some cases
by paying the clients that generate it legitimately).

So traffic can be adjusted in the direction of positive revenue depending
on the polarity of a particular transaction based settlement scheme.

Incentivizing the generation of traffic for traffic's sake results in
waste. 

Mike.

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