That's not an idea whose time is coming, it's an idea whose time has
passed. I use three different Internet service providers, and every one
of them bills flat-rate, $X per month. I would not consider using any
provider that billed by the minute or byte. Flat rate is easy to
budget for and simple for the providers to administer.
As an analogy, there's cable. I pay flat rate for cable too. (Well,
it's broken down into subscriptions for particular channels, but the
point is that I pay $X/month no matter how long I watch or don't watch.)
The analogy of charging for bandwidth is pay-per-view, a concept which
has been *spectacularly* unsuccessful in the cable world. All of the
reports I've heard about cable companies providing Internet access have
described flat-rate pricing structures.
Of course long-distance phone service uses the pay-per-use pricing
model. But that's not some kind of natural law of the universe.
Several years ago, Arthur C. Clarke forecasted that worldwide phone
service would go to flat rate by the end of the century. I think he may
not be far off. (Yes, that's the same Clarke who invented the concept
of the communications satellite.)
> Above all we need to get away from the URL concept, in which every link
> has a specific address hard-coded into it!
Yah, that method is fundamentally incompatible with distributed
services. I've been running into exactly this problem while putting
URL-style FTP pointers into my FAQ: the notation discourages people from
visiting mirror sites. I can't wait for some sort of indirect URN
notation to become usable.
regards, tom lane
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