(eternity) democracy is a bad idea on the net too! (fwd)

Forwarded message:

> Date: Sat, 5 Dec 1998 20:26:51 GMT
> From: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
> Subject: (eternity) democracy is a bad idea on the net too!

> Markus Kuhn wrote:
> > The main research aspect of this project is the joint administration of
> > such distributed archives. For spam protection, you still need people
> > who decide, which files are allowed on the distributed server
> > infrastructure, and which are not. 
> 
> I think a better deciding factor of which files remain and which don't
> is hard, anonymous ecash.  Allow the author, or server to charge for
> storage, and charge for access.  Allow readers to contribute ecash to
> the continued existance of a data.  Throw the lot together and let
> profit maximisation sort the rest out.

There is some window for abuse in this method. It allows a well endowed
entity to bias the information available. There is also the question of data
degredation, in the sense of worth, over time versus the archival/historical
worth of the data. Two major negatives to a free-market approach that are
never discussed.


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Jim Choate writes:
> Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> wrote:
> > I think a better deciding factor of which files remain and which don't
> > is hard, anonymous ecash.  [...]
> 
> There is some window for abuse in this method. It allows a well endowed
> entity to bias the information available. 

The alternatives, such as say one vote per person have problems too.
Perhaps one person cares greatly about the issue and spends the one
vote posting pro-X information (for some issue X), and the other
person hardly cares at all, but has some slight bias against issue X
so spends one vote posting anti-X information.  Now we have ignored
this difference in scale.

Cash allows you to measure the scale.

Perhaps an in-between voting metric might be percentage of individuals
wealth.  But then this also is unfair because a pennyless dole sponger
could dump 50% of his wealth on an issue on a whim, and the person who
has mega bucks may have worked hard to have the money to help
disseminate information about some issue Y he believes passionately
in.

So straight cash seems I think to be a good metric.

Note also my earlier comment that I view an important eternity
objective to be preventing negative votes on data availability.  You
can only disseminate more, say contradictory, information not remove
information.  You can attempt to disseminate more copies (make
available with higher redundancy, and fund faster download) perhaps,
but this does not drown out the other information.

Filtering and rating services should ensure that just because there
are a lot of copies of naff software my mega-corp M out there, it
won't in anyway reduce your access to quality open source software,
nor slow you down in finding it neatly cataloged by use by your
quality open source software rating service.

If you worry that mega-corp M will buy all available space at a
premium, there is an easy solution: if mega-corporation M decides to
flood eternity space with their inferior software, one can combat them
by getting into the eternity servers business, taking their money and
using the profits to disseminate quality open source software, or
simply to profit from their gullibility.

> There is also the question of data degredation, in the sense of
> worth, over time versus the archival/historical worth of the
> data.

As long as people are interested to keep the data around in low
priority low access speed storage they will pay for this to happen.

If they don't care -- well they don't care.  People who do care can
fund it, and evangelize to others on the merits of doing this.  No one
has any special right to force others to pay for keeping junk around
for the sheer historical sake of completeness of it.

Adam

At 02:47 PM 12/5/98 -0600, Jim Choate wrote, not in this order:
> Two major negatives to a free-market approach that are never discussed.

>There is also the question of data degredation, in the sense of worth, 
>over time versus the archival/historical worth of the data.

Huh?  We talk about this all the time.  How much does data storage cost,
and how long is the information useful to readers and writers,
and how do these change over time?   Those are some of the main factors
that drive the potential pricing structures -- if you get them
wrong you either bleed money (so nobody wants to offer the service)
or overcharge (so almost nobody wants to buy it), but if you get
them right you might Make Big Bucks, if you're good and there's
really a market for this sort of thing.

>There is some window for abuse in this method.
>It allows a well endowed entity to bias the information available. 

Not in any way that matters, and this _is_ a critical free-market point.
Yes, rich folks can pay for eternity services that carry all the
information they care about, just as they can pay for web pages they want,
because they've got money to burn and can overpay for it,
while you politically correct poorer folks can pay for the information
you want, but only if it's economically viable, just as with the web.
Get used to it.  Information storage isn't an economic good like land,
where they ain't making any more of that stuff, so if rich people
can outbid you for the fixed supply you lose - it's a good that
increases in supply as money gets thrown at people who generate it,
and having rich people making the cover traffic grow is a Good Thing.
	(In reality, of course, the early market will be biased toward 
	porn, warez, and pirated music, just like the rest of the net :-)

As has been discussed on this list before, there are two main
components to the cost - the cost of storage and the cost of retrieval.
Storage keeps getting radically cheaper and larger every year, and
you could provide storage forever for about twice the cost of one year's 
storage, assuming minimal inflation and continual technology improvement.

On the other hand, the cost of retrieval depends on how often the
document is accessed, as well as for how long - you could probably provide
a fixed N accesses per year forever for a low fixed price,
because bandwidth will keep getting cheaper,
but to accommodate any volume of retrievals, you need to charge
per access, either as digicash or perhaps substitutes such as banner ads
if they bring in enough revenue (Geocities apparently thinks they do.)





				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
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