Re: trying to reconcile two threads

["Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <dee3 at torque.pothole.com>]

As a very rough rule of thumb: In a competitive situation, prices tend
towards costs plus some profit margin. In monopoly situations, a
profit seeking monopolist tries to maximize their profits by pricing
at the "benefit" to the customer minus just enough to give the
customer some incentive to buy.

A customer with a NAT arguably gets some more benefit from the network
connection than a customer with just one computer hooked up. If their
provided can successfully impose a substantially higher price on the
NAT customer even when the provider's costs are the same, I would take
this as evidence that the provider was exploiting monopoly power to
increase their profits.

Donald

From:  "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony at atkielski.com>
Message-ID:  <00ba01c17856$7fd21700$0a00000a at atkielski.com>
To:  <erosen at cisco.com>, "Fred Baker" <fred at cisco.com>
Cc:  <ietf at ietf.org>
References:  <200111282028.PAA13955 at erosen-u10.cisco.com>
Date:  Wed, 28 Nov 2001 22:49:03 +0100

>Eric writes:
>
>> The  cable companies want to  charge per computer
>> ...
>
>Why?  Their costs are based on the amount of capacity used, not the number of
>computers connected.  A transfer volume of 1 GB per month costs the company the
>same whether it is carried out by one computer or ten computers.