[ppml] [narten at us.ibm.com: PI addressing in IPv6 advances in ARIN]

[Owen DeLong]

>> Back then, telephone companies counted every penny
>> of every single point-to-point 
> 
> They counted minutes not pennies. For telco a minute is a basic cost
> driver that suits very well for cost models, billing, pricing,
> settlements etc. The Internet equivalent of the minute is one bit. Any
> prudent ISP would want to count every bit for each customer for proper
> billing, settlements, etc.
> 
The problem with this theory is that in the telephone model, there is
a (relatively) clear relationship between the initiator of the call
and someone who wants to pay for the traffic.

In the internet, often, connections are initiated somewhat outside
of the users control by advertisers. In these cases, advertisers
should be seeing the bill for the bits, not the user who received
the pop-up or click-ad as an IMG tag in some web page he went to
or email he received.

On the internet, there simply isn't a good mechanism for tying either
end of the connection to who should pay for it.  To further complicate
this matter, there is the issue of spoofed address traffic.  Should
I really be billed for someone originating a terrabyte of traffic I
didn't know existed, just because they picked one of my IP addresses
at random?

Per-minute or per-unit pricing works in a circuit-switched environment.
In a packet-switched environment, it gets substantially more difficult
to implement in a fair or equitable manner.

Owen


-- 
If it wasn't crypto-signed, it probably didn't come from me.
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