Subject: Re: is it ok if I quote?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 22 Sep 2002 22:20:02 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3241722002773583@naggum.no>

* Stefan Schmiedl
| So the current situation is a kind of non-optimized "win-win" situation,

  Well, that would perhaps be your conclusion, but it does not follow from
  anything I wrote.

| Let's assume that Google would charge end users for the classification, and
| be charged for the right to provide the information by the authors.  Do you
| think that it would still work, or would it lead to the end of the service?

  The Internet will not become a money machine until the banking industry
  figures out how to transfer money for free so you can charge USD 0.005 (half
  a cent) for some simple service like, say, reading a newspaper article you
  have searched for.  With today's payment system, the cost of the transfer of
  the funds completely dwarf the cost of the service paid for.  Various ways to
  deal with "electronic cash" have failed (I attended the opening of the First
  Virtual Internet Bank, but it folded after losing money mainly due to a
  severe shortage of cooperation from the banking industry), and I think the
  biggest hurdle is that the banking industry has a negative incentive in
  letting transactions be cheap or free -- they are lending the money that
  people have effectively lent them out again to other people and only make
  money if they can have stable capitalization.  If transfers were free, people
  would move money around all day to get better interest rates from wherever,
  and then the interest rates would drop and probably make borrowing much more
  expensive.  This situation, however, is what acutely prevents the Internet
  from taking off as a network for paid services.  (The other options are to
  let micropayments accumulate at each site and only to charge or credit credit
  cards when the amount surpassed certain thresholds on the one hand, which
  exposes the receiver of the funds to high risk, and prepayment of some small
  amount that is effectively always unavailable to the payer on the other hand,
  which exposes the payer of the money to high risk.)

-- 
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.