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

Sun Aug 23 04:44:51 UTC 1998

Mike Leber writes:

>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.

Which is okay - they're paying for it.

>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.) 

Err.
How is this *ANY* different to whats already happening?

There's an already established and well-tried way around this if you're
worried - the use of web caches. We've been using them for quite some time
over here in Australia, because of the cost of traffic from the US (where
a large part of the end userbase wants traffic from..)

Its not a perfect solution but its working quite nicely here.. 

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

Transactions on the internet don't provide their value. The flow of information
does. 

>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).

Which is what is already happening in some places.

>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. 

If you want to put a value on 'transactions', then how would you treat
a website that has 30 gifs on it? You'd have to monitor the gif's size
as well as the number of 'transactions'...

Oh wait. You have http 1.1 . Its all inside the same stream.. so now you have
to not only monitor the TCP connections, but you have to snoop inside each
stream.

Mike, what you have said with regards to websites has been happening over the
past couple of years. People want the latest and greatest looks, and the
traffic flows will increase. Sure, that means more revenue in for the 
content 'provision', but if end-users pay for what they use in traffic..

Adrian