> > The number of people with Net access is expanding exponentially -- but
> > the number with *free* Net access is not. Apart from the special case of
> > students who get it with their tuition (a fairly steady-state population),
> > most of the new users these days seem to be going through one of the
> > increasing number of commercial services.
Eric S.Raymond wrote:
> Right. From the perspective of this discussion, those people *have* "free"
> access. They're already paying the base rates to buy chat and downloads;
> WWW doesn't increase their line charges unless they opt to let it do so by
> enabling in-line graphics *and* voluntarily spending more time on it.
You're not making sense here. WWW won't increase their charges unless
they actually use it? Er ... what?
The point I was trying to make was that, within a few years, the vast
majority of the Net population will be paying by the byte. We all hear
endless media hype about how everyone will have access to the
Information Supercollider [*1]. Who do you think is building all those
new "on-ramps"? Universities? Philanthropists? They're set up by
commercial organisations, who expect to make a profit out of it. That
means paying for *bandwidth*, i.e. pay by the byte (because the Net
services themselves are paying the telco for *their* bandwidth).
> I strongly disagree. I could give lots of reasons, but I'll content myself
> with one: the Web is not inherently more expensive than other interfaces
> for file retrieval. Yes, yes, I know about inline GIFs -- but graphical
> browsers have mode switches that allow you to suppress those if you care.
>
> Would you say that FTP is "an artifact of free net access"? If you think
> of httpd as the successor to ftpd, I think you'll have to agree that the
> history of FTP gives us no reason to believe such access will "fade into
> academic corners".
True, WWW is no more expensive than getting the same information by FTP.
So why do people bother with all the extra trouble involved in setting
up a WWW link? Because of the hypertext (i.e. easy access to a *lot more*
information), the pretty pictures, and the GUI -- in short, exactly the
things that eat up bandwidth.
It's Hobson's choice: If you just want a single FAQ file, you might as
well use FTP. If you want hypertext/graphics/etc, you suffer pain in the
hip pocket for your troubles (or will in the future). *That's* why I
think WWW, in its present inefficient form, will never take over the Net.
So how would a more practical global-hypertext system work? First, we
need more efficient compression techniques, especially for graphics.
Photographs/paintings -> fractal maps, line drawings -> vector graphics,
that sort of thing. We need *lots and lots* of mirror sites. We need
smart local servers that can figure out the cheapest way of getting a
given item.
Above all we need to get away from the URL concept, in which every link
has a specific address hard-coded into it! The link should specify an
object to be fetched, and the smart server figures out where to get it
from (and if fetching it would cost more than some user-configured
threshold amount, it puts up a little box saying, "This download will
cost you $1.99; OK/Cancel?"). URN looks like a promising start here.
[*1: Would this be a good place to admit that I seem to have been the
inventor of the word "Infobahn"? No, I thought not. :-( ]
... Ross Smith (Wellington, New Zealand) <alien@meanmach.actrix.gen.nz> ...
Keeper of the FAQ for rec.aviation.military
"I inspected the man closely -- he was the nearest thing I'd seen to a
human being, without actually being one." (Ned Seagoon)
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