Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: ALSO MUST READ NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point."
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:02:46 -0700
________________________________________ From: Jean Camp [ljeanc () gmail com] Sent: Monday, June 16, 2008 1:41 PM To: David Farber Cc: ip Subject: Re: [IP] ALSO MUST READ NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point." On Jun 15, 2008, at 1:08 PM, David Farber wrote:
Mr. O'Dell is correct about rate, but the scarce resource here is _congestion_ flows, which are highly variable. The correct (economically, and in my modestly informed opinion technically) way to charge for these is with some form of spot pricing, i.e. prices that change in real time and with location. When there's no congestion, no matter how much bandwidth someone currently uses the charge should be zero. Conversely, when your neighbors are running real-time movies via IP, both you and they should be charged congestion fees for whatever each of you is doing. Even if you did not "cause" the congestion, your usage is exacerbating it for everyone.
There is a serious moral hazard problem with congestion pricing as so clearly illustrated in the California electricity market. If the price goes up when the supply goes down and there are extreme barriers to entry, congestion pricing results in suppliers chocking off the supply in order to maximize revenue. Esther's dining model fails in this discussion because choice is limited and there is little to no entry. (See the short and sad history of CLECs.) It seems like many of your subscribers are almost re-inventing Clarks' expected capacity mechanism from the nineties, first presented (I think) as "Explicit Allocation for Best Effort Packet Delivery Service" at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference in 96. It is worth a read. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=288396.288401 [[The Expected Capacity Service is a two level priority scheme. It provides a guaranteed minimum capacity service with a guaranteed burst size allowance provided by a token bucket. For sender-pays, each user selects a profile. The profile consists of two measures: minimum rate and token bucket depth (comparable to TCP's window size.) In response to the user's selected profile, the service provider offers a price for the time period (e.g. a month) in which the profile will be enforced. Thus users are provided a fixed and predictable price for their selected profile.]] thanks, L. Jean Camp http://www.ljean.com Net Trust http://code.google.com/p/nettrust/ Economics of Security http://www.infosecon.net/ ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Current thread:
- ALSO MUST READ NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point." David Farber (Jun 15)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: ALSO MUST READ NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point." David Farber (Jun 15)
- Re: ALSO MUST READ NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point." David Farber (Jun 15)
- Re: ALSO MUST READ NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point." David Farber (Jun 15)
- Re: ALSO MUST READ NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point." David Farber (Jun 16)
- Re: ALSO MUST READ NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point." David Farber (Jun 17)
- ALSO MUST READ NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point." David Farber (Jun 18)