LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 17:39:55 +0930

Re: BPA & 100mb / Day Limit

On Tue, Jun 05, 2001 at 05:22:36PM +0930, John Edwards wrote:
> Mark Newton wrote:
> 
> > Providers offer "unlimited" plans because they want to monopolize a
> > particular market space.  
> 
> There's also the breed that offer 'unlimited' access because it requires
> no accounting. No counting bytes, no radius logs to grind, no difficult
> plans to explain to customers and no need to employ someone to run it.
> There used to be a lot more around like this (ie: Windows NT systems
> with no native accounting ability), but now most 'unlimited' providers
> are in it for the market share.
> 


John,

That's the story I was told about US IAPs in the last few years.
Some companies first tried charging by the MByte, and then they
found that more than half of the time of the staff was
taken up with customer complaints that they were being overcharged.
US subscribers are like that. They think that if they buy something
off you, then you have to make them happy for the rest of their life.
It seems that some customers were counting the bytes, and they
argued over them. Of course it's really difficult to specify
at which network location and in which protocol layer you're going to define
the bytes.

But after finding that US customers hate per-MByte charging, there
was a move towards unmetered. After all, that's how they get
their local calls. And that has created hug problems too.
The philosophy now is to just load up zillions of users to a single
aggregation point, and use natural congestion to limit the uesrs.
This makes users very irate too.

It really annoys me the way clever business school graduates
come up with these stupid business "strategies" (which are
really tactics) for how to
destroy the opposition so that they can have a monopoly,
instead of doing what capitalism is supposed to be about,
which is to win on the basis of excellence. 

The whole obsession with patents and copyrights on the net
now is all about trying to create monopolies, because
internet businesses can't be bothered to compete on quality.

The sooner the clever/stupid "business strategists" are replaced
with sensible engineering types, the better.

The good thing about linux and open source is that it attempts
to obliterate the concept of intellectual property monopoly.
In fact, this isn't a communist plot. It's an anti-communist plot,
because capitalism is supposed to be about free competition,
and communism was supposed to be monopoly by the state.
But virtually every internet venture now just thinks about
getting a monopoly. And a private monopoly is even worse than
a government monopoly. At least we can vote the govt monopoly out.

If anyone thinks this is off-topic, I disagree. I'm just trying
to comment on the big picture within which linux is an
important part and symbol now.

When we see companies trying to send their competition broke through
predatory pricing (which is supposed to be illegal, but it doesn't
seem to get enforced, e.g. airlines, insurance industry, ISPs
offering services below cost), and this sends the predators broke,
what we're seeing is a belated punishment for attempting to
achieve private monopoly.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

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