Thanks John for your support! I think we should all be careful not to return to the good old days of Telex bilateral agreements! Cheers...\Stef At 22:06 -0400 5/28/03, John C Klensin wrote: >Since Stef has chimed in here, let me point out one other aspect of payment systems, one that is more or less the corollary to his observation about bilateral agreements. It is an interesting and useful property of the Internet email environment that we have SMTP servers all over the place, some of them operated at rather large scale and others operated at fairly small scale. In general, anyone can send mail to anyone else. > >But, as soon as one institutes either charging schemes or collections of bilateral agreements, there are huge incentives to created "hub systems" or "carriers" -- entities whose business it is to make agreements with lots of local providers/servers (whom they will come to call "customers") and bilateral agreements with each other. Without that, everyone who wants to run a mail server has to either establish bilateral agreements with everyone else, or a regulatory regime becomes necessary to make the sequential settlement arrangements work. Economies of scale, if only in agreement-making, imply few enough, and large enough, carriers for governments to start taking interest on a "competition" or "anti-trust" or "consumer protection" basis. Sorry to be pessimistic about this, but I think it quickly takes us where we don't want to go. > >Quoting Stef, "be careful what you wish for..." > > john > > > >--On Wednesday, 28 May, 2003 13:04 -0700 Einar Stefferud <Steflist@thor.nma.com> wrote: > >>Hello Dave Morris --- >> >>It would be helpful if you would explain how this payment >>system of yours might actually work in real life. >> >>Perhaps like TELEX worked before it died, with settlements >>between the first posing ISP to the last receiving ISP, with >>"settlement" payments spread across all ISPs in between. >> >>Of course this leads to bilateral agreements among al the >>thousands of ISPs, and collective agreements among the mass >>of global ISPs. >> >>Now, consider the cost of such arrangements, to cover the >>frictional costs of just being in business, plus the required >>profit margins that accrue to any such massive payment >>shuffling. >> >>Everyone here advocating payments do not seem to understand >>the overhead costs of collecting and distributing the money. >> >>Be careful of what you wish for! -- You just might get it! >> >>Cheers...\Stef