Chapter 8. Commerce
8.4. Other Commerce Issues
To this point, this chapter has discussed payment systems that handle
purchases of one sort or another using the WWW. They do not handle
transactions for such low-level activities as passing communications
packets across a network. The Digital Silk Road
(Hardy) proposes including
a money field in some packets that can be used to pay for the transit
of the packet across the network. In a sense, the packets are cars
and the links in the networks are toll roads. The companies that
maintain links on the network receive income from the packets that use
their links. Per-packet pricing for international network traffic has
already been implemented in Chile(Baeza-Yates)
and New
Zealand (Brownlee).
This approach to paying for network access has advantages. Instead of
paying a set amount each month, a user pays only for what he uses.
This could save a light-traffic user money if the user transmits only
a small amount of traffic. This approach also subsidizes companies
for maintaining network links. The companies' income is
related to their quality of service, reliability, and toll rate. The
major (and potentially prohibitive) disadvantage is that current
protocols must be rewritten to use this approach.
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Copyright © 1996 Patrick N. Brooks
All Rights Reserved
Patrick N. Brooks
<pbrooks@vt.edu>