

Tech is too cheap to meter, It's time to manage for Abundance - Readmore
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-07/mf_freer?currentPage=1

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stcredzero
Shouldn't SMS messages already be in the "too cheap to meter" category?

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kragen
It's my understanding that they started out that way in Europe, which is how
they got popular. But then somehow the carriers started charging for them. I
don't understand how this happened, and I suspect it warrants an antitrust
investigation — surely any carrier that offered free SMS with a slightly
higher per-minute voice rate would attract a lot of customers who made voice
calls once every month or two, and clean up. So I suspect price-fixing.

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edfgtrfgh
It would take a lot of voice calls to make up for charging 10p/10c for a text
which costs nothing to send!

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kragen
I'm not saying it would be _more_ profitable; I'm saying it wouldn't _lose
money_ , and a lot of people would prefer that service to the service they
have. So in a competitive market, someone would be offering it.

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asciilifeform
Notice how everything which is technically "too cheap to meter" _gets metered
anyway._ Text messages, ring tones, etc. are all examples of products with a
cost of production approaching zero, which consumers are charged for simply
because it is possible to do so.

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xiaoma
Each of those cases relies upon monopolies, laws against reverse-engineering
or both. In a competitive market, cell phones that allowed consumers load
sounds from their personal computers as ring tones would quickly dominate.

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randallsquared
Except in the case where they're much more expensive, which is the case
currently. Smartphones can generally do custom ringtones, right?

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kragen
I don't think they can be more expensive except because of subsidies for dumb-
phones. It doesn't require any extra hardware for a phone to download software
from the web-site of your choice, and only two pins routed to the outside for
it to download from your computer.

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rw
> This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart
> people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them.
> It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world.

Try calling it _experimentation_ or _play_. This dramatic word usage reminds
me of how programmers are supposedly "lazy", when we are actually just being
_efficient_ by amortizing our development costs.

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edfgtrfgh
When free evening/weekend calls were first introduced there were stories of
people using their cell phones as baby monitors - the phone co had to
introduce a one hour maximum call length.

