I didn't read the original comment as meaning that it was not possible to gather statistics from network traffic -- the point, I think, is that once you have those statistics, it's not obvious how to attribute value to them (I thought the "it" referred to the "value", not the "traffic").
A charging scheme that attributed value to volume of traffic, for example, would place all the value in the content consumer - content supplier relationship with the content supplier (since there would be a nett traffic volume inbalance in the direction supplier -> consumer). [...]
hang on Joe - its a bit more complex than that - part of the underlying shift in the Internet world as opposed to the telephony world is the move from a tariff regime where one party is charged the entire end-to-end costs of the transaction to a world where both ends of a network 'transaction' bear part of the costs of the carriage of data across the intermediary transit networks. Rather than massively cut and paste it may be easier to point you to an article about peering and interconnection which explores these issues of bilateral partial path funding and its impact on inter-provider arrangements within the Internet. You'll find it at: http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/759/ipj_2-1/ipj_2-1_ps1.html and (part 2) http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/759/ipj_2-2/ipj_2-2_ps1.html Geoff --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog