Let us turn this question on its head: Why should data network usage
be free even to universities, when telephone and postal usage are
not?
The question is, does
society benefit more from priced or unpriced network resources?
As we have argued, other approaches to controlling congestion are either flawed or have undesirable side-effects. Pricing approaches have the overwhelming advantage that they permit users, acting individually (or as organizations, if the pricing is only applied at the organizational level) to express the value that they place on obtaining network services. Thus, pricing directly provides the information needed to allocate scarce resources during times of congestion to those users who value them most. There is no need to assign arbitrary priorities, or to force high-value users to suffer from being stuck in a first-come, first-served line behind low-value users. The paper by [MacKie-Mason et al. 1995a] in this volume, and [MacKie-Mason and Varian 1994] discuss the advantages of pricing for congestion in more detail.