Brad Ideas - On the invention of the internet - Comments

voip

Ellie Drey — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 17:34:06 -0700

You mentioned that :"pay-by-the-hour environments like Compuserve did manage to do well when their cost was low enough that people werenâ€™t watching the clock so much." Pay per usage is a difficult bussiness. Charging wether people use or not is what i would like to expect if i was going to make money on a consumer/ provider level only. On a larger scale like wholesale, pay per usage helps more to make profit.

Ellie Drey
LongDistance-T1.com

John Gilmore — Thu, 05 May 2005 11:23:10 -0700

It's easier to trace the roots of this if you look at paying not "for your half" but "for your pipe to the rest of the network".

UUCP mail and USENET newsgroups often worked this way. A site already on the network would allow others to phone it (at their own expense) and thereby join the network. The original nonprofit UUNET, a telephone UUCP/USENET service, was designed to reduce these phone costs, particularly for people who had to call long-distance, by aggregating the calls into one company, getting a volume discount, and charging at a rate designed to recover the costs. It worked.

When three companies started the second Bay Area regional ISP, The Little Garden, in 1990, we split down our $1000/mo UUNET Internet bill evenly, plus, each of us also paid the cost of our own 56K leased-line (or dialup modem-line) that tied us into the nearest point on the network. After connecting about thirty individuals and companies, things got more formal, with these costs more buried in generic pricing. TLG became the backbone of many dozens of little ISPs in N. Calif.

On the invention of the internet

brad — Wed, 04 May 2005 05:21:26 -0700

Update: A more active thread on how this relates to Goodmail and other attempts at sender-pays traffic

There is much talk these days of “who invented the internet?” Most of the talk is done wearing a network engineer’s hat, defining the internet in terms of routing IP datatgrams, and TCP. Some relates to the end to end principle. These are valid and vital contributions, and recognition for those who built them is important.

But that’s not what the public thinks of when it hears “the internet.” They think of the collection of cool applications they use to interact with other people and distant computers. Web sites and mailing lists and newsgroups and filesharing and VoIP and downloading and chat and much more. Why did these spring into being in this way rather than on other networks?

I believe a large and necessary ingredient for “the internet” wasn’t a technological invention at all, but a billing system. The internet is based on what I call the “internet cost contract.” That contract says that each person pays for their own pipe to the center, and we don’t account for the individual traffic.

“I pay for my half, you pay for yours.”

While the end-to-end design allowed innovation and experimentation, the billing design really made it possible. In the early days of the internet, people dreamed up all sorts of bizarre applications, some serious, some entirely frivolous. They put them out there and people played with them and the most interesting thrived.

Many other networks had users paying not by the pipe, but based on traffic. In that world, had you decided to host a mailing list, or famously put a webcam up in front of your company fishtank, the next day the company beancounter would have called you into the office to ask why the company got a big bandwidth bill in order to show off the fishtank. The webcam — or FTP site or mailing list — would have been shut down immediately, and for perfectly valid reasons.

Pay-based-on-usage demands that applications be financially justifiable to live. Pay-per-pipe allowed mailing lists, ftp sites, usenet, archie, gopher and the web to explode.