CS99I Meeting 5 Notes: Paying for the web

Started by Gio Wiederhold, 27 February 2001.

Who gets paid for providing web services

Payment schemes also have to assure that all who are setlled with costs are reimbursed.

  1. The vendor of information. Often the public expectation is that information is free. However, valuable, or value-added information, that has higher quality, more precision and completeness, and wastes less of the clients attention may well be worth paying for. Unfortunatly, convenient payment schemes for the small amounts appropriate for snippets of onfgormation have not found broad acceptance. Today (2000), the advertisement model dominates.
  2. The vendor of goods: described as above. For goods the payments are more substantial, so that credit card schemes are acceptable.
  3. The Internet access services: The ISPs. The purchase bandwidth from backbone transmission providers or other, larger ISPs. ISPs oversubscribe, trusting statistical random behavior of their customers. A large ISP will have multiple interconnections with a backbone, and may also try to move much traffic internally. Major ISPs are AOL, Earthlink, Mindspring, but there are a plethora of local ones as Erols (DC area), WNET (Bay area), etc.
  4. The backbone providers: paid by the ISPs for long-distance transit services. There is not just a single backbone, but many suppliers (list to come). The original settlement among them was by free Peering. There are now at least two tiers, as newer companies enter the transmission provider market. Top tier providers include UUnet (derived from UNIX-based intercomputer services), AT&T (based on POTS transmission capabilities) now with cable TV lines from TCI, Sprint (started with the Southern Pacific railroad right-of-way for transmissions), MCI (an early POTS long-distance competitor to AT&T), Cable&Wireless (of British origin, strong in Asia), PSI, Worldcom (grown by mergers of ..). Closely following are Williams, Letter3, Qwest, etc.
All of them have multiple interconnect points, and will add or close interconnections as demand and their profitability mandates. Two major interconnection points, freely available to all are MaeWest, in the SanFrancisco Bay Are (where?) and MaeEast (Tysons Corner, VA, near DC)

Moving service to the edge of the net

AKEMAI.

Notes

See
See also the references.