From: frantz@netcom.com (Bill Frantz)
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 10:25:29 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Market Value of Web Pages
Message-ID: <199511100140.RAA09572@netcom11.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 13:28 11/9/95 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
>With all due respect to Bill--his mention of agorics tells me he knows
>something about computational ecologies and markets--, there is no
>reasonable way to say what price is "closer to the current market value of
>the page content," except by what the market will bear!

Tim is absolutely correct that the market determines the current market
value.  I mentioned some low value items in the current market and he
mentioned some high value ones.

However, there is not really a problem in paying for high valued web pages
(like the $400/photo consultant report he mentions).  The various network
payment schemes that have been proposed and implemented will handle these
quite adaquatly.

What concerns me is building systems that can support low-cost high-volume
markets.  If I have to pay a penny/page, I am going to ask whether Netscape
can use a whole gigabyte disk for its cache and have basically a pay/copy
system.  If the cost is low enough, I will pay/view and avoid stale data in
the cache problems.  However, there are very few systems where the
transaction costs are low enough to support low-cost high-volume markets.

Bill


-----------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz                   Periwinkle  --  Computer Consulting
(408)356-8506                 16345 Englewood Ave.
frantz@netcom.com             Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA