Comments on: Framing making

By: echovar » Blog Archive » The Network’s Continental Congress: Searls, Gillmor, Windley, Arrington

Sun, 18 May 2008 18:57:32 +0000

[...] (under the pseudonym “Publius“) often published between three and four essays per week. Doc Searls just announced Publius.cc at the Berkman@10 event: The Publius Project is a “compilation of [...]

By: Mike Warot

Mike Warot — Sat, 17 May 2008 02:14:14 +0000

Crosbie, we’re in agreement.

Now… back to the original question I had… what is a “first cost”?

By: Crosbie Fitch

Crosbie Fitch — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:48:06 +0000

I’m wholly against inspection let alone treatment of packets based upon their content. Let the packet declare its nature and be treated according to its declaration.

Regulation of such neutrality wouldn’t be required if there was a competitive market, so I’d suggest any regulation should only apply in clearly uncompetitive markets.

By: Mike Warot

Mike Warot — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:30:46 +0000

Crosbie, I think that offering other classes of service doesn’t break the analogy if the contents of the packet aren’t inspected as a condition of the service.
Imagine if it was the head of FedEx or UPS that said:“Now what they would like to do is use my trucks for free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these trucks to pay for the portion they’re using.”

Nobody really expects free transit of packets, just uniform pricing, with classes of service based on expediency, etc.

Discriminating against the ends is just wrong.

By: Crosbie Fitch

Crosbie Fitch — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:20:11 +0000

But, Mike, people can always altruistically mark their packets as “Non-urgent freight, rather get there later than never” or “Get me there within 1 second if you can, or drop me, because I’ll be out of date” or “Unimportant – discard me if busy”.

By: Mike Warot

Mike Warot — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:01:42 +0000

I think my comment at that site got eaten… so I’ll cross post it here.

I’m not sure what a “first cost” is, but would be interested to know.
I don’t see how the Open source mention ties in to discussion of the internet. It doesn’t flow well.
The postal metaphor is perfect for the internet… each packet costs the same amount to deliver, orthogonal to the value it has to society. It’s up to the users to use it wisely.
Charging by the maximum capacity, or per bit are the only two pricing models that are acceptable. Uniform rates applied uniformly to all should be our standard.
Nobody should be forced to ride in the back of the bus just because they aren’t the majority (web, email, etc) and happen to be a different on the surface (bittorrent, irc, voip).
Now, as with delivery, you can always pay for a faster route, at a premium. But again, uniform rates applied uniformly should be the rule.
–Mike–

By: Crosbie Fitch

Crosbie Fitch — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:30:02 +0000

Funnily enough I've just blogged about how the US constitution doesn't necessarily sanction copyright or patent. See Constitutional Sanction.