Transaction Based Settlements Encourage Waste (was Re: B

Mike Leber mleber at he.net
Mon Aug 24 20:33:56 UTC 1998


On Mon, 24 Aug 1998, Sean Butler wrote:
> For the opposite direction, if you
> can write an app that sends more traffic out to the other network, you'll need
> a valid host to talk to.  I'm sure the other provider won't have one of their own
> machines doing that, so you'll need a customer of the other network to receive
> that traffic.  But now that they are charged for it, that won't happen.  (I'm
> sure someone out there can think of ways around this, but I imagine there are
> solutions to them. 

(note, his was a receiver pays system)

You appear to be missing the point that there are perfect legitimate and
non fraudulent ways of increasing the amount of traffic generated.  For
example, simply pay all your web hosting clients based on the amount of
traffic generated.  Then instruct them on ways to maximize their revenue
using methods that don't overly annoy users.  For example: 

1) implement anticaching measures (both antibrowser cache and anti
transparent proxy cache)

2) make their pages automatically reload every minute to show some dynamic
indicator (say, the temperature and humiditty outside).

3) use lots of very long streaming data.  They should have sound on every
page (and the sound files should be 3 weeks of data).  That way if
somebody visits your client's site and then goes to lunch or home for the
weekend the web site is still generating revenue by playing this huge
sound file because the visitor's browser was left viewing your client's
nice site. 

etc...

It really is only limited by your imagination.  You can generate
legitimate, non fraudulent traffic in either direction in any quantity
desired.  The reason people don't do this right now is that they have to
PAY for it.  In any of these transaction settlement scenarios you end up
getting PAID for it in one direction or another and this causes waste. 

Mike.

+------------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -------------------+
| Mike Leber             Direct Internet Connections     Voice 408 282 1540 |
| Hurricane Electric      Web Hosting & Co-location        Fax 408 971 3340 |
| mleber at he.net                                           http://www.he.net |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+





More information about the NANOG mailing list