As a very rough rule of thumb: In a competitive situation, prices tend towards costs plus some profit margin. In monopoly situations, a profit seeking monopolist tries to maximize their profits by pricing at the "benefit" to the customer minus just enough to give the customer some incentive to buy.
A customer with a NAT arguably gets some more benefit from the network connection than a customer with just one computer hooked up. If their provided can successfully impose a substantially higher price on the NAT customer even when the provider's costs are the same, I would take this as evidence that the provider was exploiting monopoly power to increase their profits. Donald From: "Anthony Atkielski" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID: <00ba01c17856$7fd21700$[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Fred Baker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 22:49:03 +0100 >Eric writes: > >> The cable companies want to charge per computer >> ... > >Why? Their costs are based on the amount of capacity used, not the number of >computers connected. A transfer volume of 1 GB per month costs the company the >same whether it is carried out by one computer or ten computers.
