Todd Day <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> here. How many of us list managers would run their lists if they had
> to pay for every message they sent?
Well, in today's internet, if the lists are big enough it surely costs
someone real money to host them.
What Mike Nolan and I have been talking about is an idea that would
allow the entire cost of hosting even a big list to be paid by the
subscribers. This cost per subscriber would be very cheap (probably
barely noticable, see below).
> When you don't have to worry about paying for every letter you type,
> you are much more likely to express yourself better and more
> completely and in ways you might not have thought about before.
Hmm... let's see, if a payment system could be introduced which does not
create administrative overhead, what would be the postage for a 10KB
e-mail message?
At a server farm like Digiserve (see http://www.digiserve.com) you can
transfer about 150MB of data for one dollar. So the price of the
internet connection bandwidth which is required for sending a 10KB
e-mail message is about US-$0.000067
A similar amount of connection bandwidth is required at the receiving
end, therefore "international priority" postage for the 10KB e-mail
message should come to about US-$0.00013
Since the postage for sending the copies of the message from the
mailing list server to the recipients would be paid by the recipients,
when you post to the list you will only have to pay for getting your
message to the mailing list server, allowing you to make 75 posts of
10KB each for a single cent.
I don't think that this would deter anyone from expressing himself
freely in any e-mail discussion (whether on-list or not).
Of course, participating in a mailing list that generates a lot of
traffic will cost something: 1 cent for every 750KB of mailing list
traffic.
If people feel that this is too much, then there will be ways of
reducing _both_ the real cost and the perceived cost of mailing
list traffic. For example, strategically-placed smarthosts could be
used to reduce the amount of traffic through key bottlenecks such as
the intercontinental links. Also, on non-saturated networks where most
of the traffic comes from interactive applications (such as telnet,
browsing the web, streamed audio and video) it should be possible to
take advantage of the fluctuations in the intensity of that kind of
traffic to transfer emails during those seconds when the intensity of
interactive traffic is relatively low.
> It is my firm belief that the vast amount of bandwidth available on
> tap to all comers is what makes the Internet such an exciting
> communications device in the first place.
Yes. It's good that we have a vast amount of bandwidth available.
But that does not justify wasting any of it.
May blessings from the eternal God surprise and overtake you!
Norbert.
--
Norbert Bollow, Zuerich, Switzerland. Backup e-mail address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
