Packets And Thingies

And this article by Arnold Kling is the first of a two-part series looking at the economics and architecture of what I think of as electronic infrastructure. His comments on the economics of Packets are interesting, and I think he’s right that we’ll see packet delivery priced at different levels for different volumes. Yahoo! is already doing a form of this with its email, briefcase, and other services — you get X amount for free, but for $Y you get this much more storage, functionality etc. I think Arnold’s comments also have some relevance to the electricity industry, because it too is an industry that relies on interconnecting and sharing infrastructure.