ATTN: for-profit Tor operators

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 03:21:29PM -0600, Paul Andrew de La Soujeole wrote:

> I am definitely interested. I have a 10Mb/s server in Florida which is
> currently running Tor. How would users be charged? Would they be rate

How you would charge your users is entirely at discretion of the individual
operators. I suggest some low-friction payment scheme (PayPal, IBAN bank transfers
for EU users) to reduce entry threshold, but for the truly tin-hatted acceptance of 
anonymous payment schemes (cash, e-gold & Co) are almost mandatory, even
if almost nobody will make use of it.

> limited and charged per Mb/s, per GB/month, or by using a 95th percentile

For starters, I would limit the service to web browsing and assume a flat
fee (say, 5$/month subscription for basic anonymous browsing via Tor/privoxy).
This can be abused, but this requires some malignancy on part of the users.
Given that the first leg is encrypted but authenticated it's fundamentally
feasible to charge individual users for traffic by the GByte.

> scheme? I think this has some real potential.

Paranoia and willigness to rely on anonymization services provided by
a commercial entity (and subsequent tradeoff in accountability) are somewhat
mutually exclusive. We'll see whether the market will accept it.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.leitl.org
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