Generation of traffic in "settled" peering arrangement

Mon Aug 24 21:30:43 UTC 1998

> Are you saying that someone should be forced to pay for the privilege of 
> offering something for free to your customers? Things that your customers,
> who I number among are requesting?

I don't know what he was saying, but I'll say something like it: gatekeeper,
wuarchive, cdrom.com, and other archives of free stuff are going to have to
do some kind of micropayment scheme -- charge for downloads in other words --
in order to pay their own costs to their providers, in order that those
providers are able to pay THEIR costs, in transit they buy or in glass they
lease or whatever.

The Internet backbone's growth has been all about barriers to entry and in
special deals.  People have been buying their provisioning at flat rate or
with other subsidies, and reselling it at variable rates to folks who came
later or otherwise didn't have access to, or knowledge of, the special deals
of the pioneers.  Eventually these special deals run out of time, or run out
of bandwidth, and a true (cost-driven) market economy is developing.

What we're seeing now is just SO inevitable.
-- 
Paul Vixie
La Honda, CA			"Many NANOG members have been around
<paul at vix.com>			 longer than most." --Jim Fleming
pacbell!vixie!paul		 (An H.323 GateKeeper for the IPv8 Network)