From kragen@dnaco.net Tue Aug 11 10:12:24 1998
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 10:12:23 -0400 (EDT)
From: Kragen <kragen@dnaco.net>
To: beatty@phast.umass.edu
cc: dave@scripting.com
Subject: Re: The Emotional Age of the Internet
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Mr. Beatty said:
  That is, it doesn't cost anything but a few minutes' time to send a
  flame or thoughtless opinion email. It doesn't cost much more to
  throw an opinion on a web page. Would people require themselves to be
  more mature if they had to pay real money to express themselves --
  say, 32 cents an email? Would people plaster so much garbage on their
  web sites if they paid a per-hit price to help subsidize the cost of
  all the routers, nameservers, and so forth that supported the
  Internet? There's not much doubt in my mind. What fraction of prank
  phone-callers dial long distance?

  Of course, if anyone suggested making the Internet a pay-as-you-go
  operation, the outcry would be loud and violent (and mostly
  immature).

I think it would depend largely on the amount of cost.  Jeffrey K.
MacKie-Mason and Hal R. Varian analyzed the NSFNET's 1993 costs of
operation in 1995
<URL:http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/works/node37.html> and roughly
estimated a cost of 1/60 of a cent per packet transmitted.  The
Internet has grown considerably since then, so it's much cheaper now,
but for the sake of argument, let's accept the 1/60 of a cent figure.

When I send a mail, there are three packets in the TCP handshake, an
opening packet, a HELO packet, a 250 packet, a MAIL packet, a 250
packet, an RCPT packet, a 250 packet, a DATA packet, a response packet,
about one packet for the header and another packet for each 1460 bytes
of message data, plus an ACK packet for each, then a QUIT packet, a
response packet, and then the four closing packets.

This totals about 19 packets per email, plus one packet per screenful
of text.  So a brief email would cost 20 packets, or about a third of a
cent.

While charging a third of a cent per email might cause a loud, violent
outcry, I doubt it would reduce flaming significantly.  It would cost
me on the order of $150 a year -- less than it costs me to pay for the
use of my local ISP's modem.

(I'm assuming that recipients would bear the costs of subscribing to
mailing lists.  I've posted several things to BUGTRAQ this year, and
one post to BUGTRAQ would cost $60 or so.)

In truth, the cost is probably an order of magnitude smaller today --
in 1993, the backbone was 45 megabits, and today, there are several
redundant six-hundred-plus megabit backbones.  The true cost is
probably considerably smaller today, but I don't have any information
to estimate whether they're a hundredth of a cent per packet or a
ten-thousandth of a cent per packet.

(Web hits are even cheaper.  There's the three-way handshake, followed
by one request packet, followed by some data that gets acknowledged,
two packets per 1460 bytes, followed by the four connection-closing
packets.  An average 10-kilobyte Web page would thus take 12 packets,
or about a fifth of a cent at 1/60 of a cent per packet.)

Kragen