MEBuckner–trying to draw an analogy between the phone system and the Internet misses the point. Your phone is paid for by your phone bill. You decide the services you want and pay for them. It’s particulary apparant with long distance, where you pay more the more you use. That’s a holdover from the days when Ma Bell–the real old Ma Bell–subsidized local service with the LD revenues. Also the days when you couldn’t own your own phone.
Phone companies are essentially “pay by the drink” services. Phone companies will bundle services for a “flat” rate, betting you’ll use less than what the flat rate costs them. I happen to think that’s a good deal for the phone company and the consumer, since both can plan on costs and benefits, but it’s not a real flat rate. If your usage goes past the agreed time limit, you’ll pay for the additional usage.
Internet usage (sold as a consumer retail product) is a real flat fee service. You pay the same amount if you read two e-mails a month or if you download 2 meg a day. Services that have tried the “pay by the drink model” with online services tended to fail or change–AOL being the most famous example. (Remember hourly usage charges on AOL?)
which brings us to :
kabbes–You raise a much more difficult charge to refute. No, I can’t claim to have done a complete audit of every company that supports TCP/IP and document the amount of traffic that is truly related to the business of that company and the traffic that is not. No one can. But I know what my company spends on our WAN–several million dollars annually. A significant portion of that goes for our fees for our high-speed links, just like every other company, university and government entity. All those dollars support a network that lots of people use and believed they’re entitled to because they cough up 20-40 bucks a month, no matter how much they use. Well, I think that’s unrealistic. Also, I think it’s unfair. Why should we (my company) pay to maintain an infrastructure (the Internet) so you can go shopping on eBay?
Believe me, I understand that this is an attitude not welcome in the 'net culture, where “all data is free.” But sadly, nothing is free. Life is not college.
Yes I think the internet can be justified. But am I going to do it? Nope. I’m just going to say that the internet helped me find the lady of my dreams. It also helped my best friend find his. He’s getting married in August. The funny thing is me and my gf may have met in person by accident seeing how we go to the same college, but with my best friend that is not a possibility considering he lives in Indiana and his gf lives in Thailand. Don’t get me the bullcrap about an internet relationship because he’s flown over to see her and she is moving here before the wedding. So I say if the internet can make just one person happy and find something meaningful then well maybe it is justified.
No, not French. It’s just that I consider this a somewhat formalized forum. Our only way of communicating is by what we type, so we kind of owe it to each other to be clear on meaning and to follow some sort of vague protocol. if u type lik3 thiz I’m much less likely to take you seriously because of assumptions based on my experience with people who do type that way. You can’t go into a job interview at IBM, for example, dressed in a sandals, bermuda shorts, and sunglasses; call the interviewer “dude” or “bro” and talk like you live under a pier; tell him you’re just a lazy speaker, and expect to get hired.
Granted this isn’t anywhere near that formal, but it’s a good illustration of how I feel about it. If you want to type like a 12 year old hacker wannabe, you’ll probably get treated like one. At least by me.
Am I too picky? yeah maybe so. But I still like my idea.
