In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Rich Kulawiec <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Tue, Jun 16, 1998 at 07:28:59PM +0200, Norbert Bollow wrote:
>> A) Those who use relatively little bandwidth, but profit greatly from
>> the wealth of information available on the net.
>>
>> B) Those who use a lot of bandwidth but also contribute valuable
>> information (in posts to mailing lists, web pages, etc. etc.)
>>
>> C) Those who use a lot of bandwidth but don't contribute to the value
>> of the net as a whole.
>
>I would suggest adding to this:
>
>B') Those who use relatively little bandwidth but also contribute valuable
>information ([...]).
>
>I live -- mostly -- on the far end of a 28.8 PPP link. I *can't* use
>a lot of bandwidth even if I want to. ;-) But I maintain half a dozen
>FAQs, several websites for nonprofit organizations, run mailing lists,
>hunt spammers, work on software projects, and do a lot of other things
>(none of which I'm paid to do) that I hope make a meaningful contribution
>to the 'net community. It's payback. (And it's fun. Mostly.)
Ditto here.
>I think a great many people fall into B', and I think that attempting
>to meter Internet service by the packet will make it financially
>impossible for them to make their contributions. Further, I think
I wouldn't be too sure about that. You and I might end up paying _less_
if the whole system went to metered service. It all depends upon how it
is priced. That's the bad news. If metered Internet service ended up
being like metered telephone service (and there is no reason to thing
that it wouldn't in the current regulatory and not-quite-free-market
envoronment), then the big corporate fish would get great rates and (as
usual) the little people would get screwed.
One thing I do know is that I have never been happy with subsidizing the
bandwidth of either bulk spammers or of people who are constantly cruzing
all of the graphics-rich web pages you see these days. (Don't even get
me started about push technology and such things and stock prices and
whether forecasts that update on your screen every five seconds whether
you are looking at it or not.) But then again, maybe all these folks
have actually be subsidizing _me_ all this time, what with the local
partial newsfeed I suck daily out of my ISP and the odd occasion where
I am sucking down something gargantuan via FTP. Who knows.
>the people in B' are largely responsible for most of the interesting
>and useful things that happen on the 'net: very little of enduring
>consequence comes from the corporate sector by comparison.
I don't think that is a completely fair comment. Some commercial sites
that I find very useful are:
http://www.altavista.digital.com/
http://www.dejanews.com/
http://www.switchboard.com/
http://www.hotmail.com/ (*)
ftp.netscape.com
ftp.adobe.com
(*) Lots of net-sophisticates eschew Hotmail.Com, but I happen to think it's
great as a backup. It's nice to know that when & if your own mail server
is hosed temporarily, you can still get mail in and out via a backup Hotmail
account.
-- Ron Guilmette, Roseville, California ---------- E-Scrub Technologies, Inc.
-- Deadbolt(tm) Personal E-Mail Filter demo: http://www.e-scrub.com/deadbolt/
-- Wpoison (web harvester poisoning) - demo: http://www.e-scrub.com/wpoison/
