I landed at SFO yesterday. My airfare included some charges for airport fees which the airline itemises separately.
British Airways also got charged some money by the airport to land their plane. And because it was a 747, they got charged a lot more than the turboprop that followed us.
Not only that, but assume SFO is the only Bay Area airport with runways long enough for a 747. A local monopoly on longhaul traffic.
So we've got double-dipping and price discrimination of traffic.
Is this a problem? If not, why not? Or is freedom of travel a bad metaphor for freedom of speech, and a false analog?
What if Ed and Ivan could offer DSL for "free", if you were willing to restrict your activities to accessing preferred partners Yahoo and Amazon? Would this be a good or a bad thing?
We now return to blog silence, at least until the next time the urge to post overwhelms the urge to take a rest.
UPDATE: Some additional thoughts from a phone call I just had. People think of the roads as "free" common infrastructure. A few roads are built with tolls. Many roads get congested. Sometimes there are congestion charges (e.g. London, Stockholm) that impose a monetary charge to reflect that your journey has negative externalities for other people. But more usually charging money turns out to be a political hot potato, and everyone has to pay for congestion as a time cost. There's still a cost. We can even put a value on the wasted time, if somewhat less precisely. But a cost there most certainly is. So be wary of analogies between roads as infrastructure and Internet as infrastructure. The former is already shoulding a horrendous deadweight loss because of deficiencies of congestion and access pricing.
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