wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (11/08/85)
It just came to me! A divine inspiration as to how all the problems that stem from the phone bills of the backbone sites can be solved!! We have AT&T programming people on the net that are responsible for the billing programs, right? OK, the backbone sites provide those people with their phone numbers -- the ones to which all these costs are being billed. They patch the billing programs to skip or just ignore those numbers. Calls that would have been billed to them just get ignored. And at one stroke, the arguments about how everyone is freeloading off the backbones are cancelled! Since the true incremental costs of just about any finite number of phone calls are really practically nothing, despite what AT&T and the BOC's bill the customers for them, the costs that everybody else pays will go up a minute amount, but not really very much. Thys, everybody pays their share! And the backbones don't pay ANYTHING, for ANY use of the phone lines, which repays them for all they paid in the past AND for the disk & CPU resources they expend on the news. So everybody benefits! You may mail my Nobel Prize to my home address... Will