>> That’s basically the definition of a discriminating monopolist and what gets you airline-style inscrutable pricing and the SSO tax, isn’t it?

> You think it's discrimination to ask people who use more of a service to pay more?

Terminology confusion. In microeconomics, a “discriminating monopolist” is one who engages in “price discrimination”, that is to say providing the same service to everybody but charging each customer as much as they are willing to pay for it. This has nothing to do with the social justice usage of “discrimination” (except in the broadest sense of discriminating one kind of thing from another and acting on the result).

> You think if an enterprise is using something for business purposes it's not ok to ask them to pay more for something than if a user is using it for hobby purposes?

Insofar as they receive the same service (no or the same SLA, etc), or even insofar as the markup for the latter case is disproportionate to the actual costs, I think it is bullshit to do it. How much bullshit is acceptable, both in life and in selling technical services, is to be decided (certainly a nonzero amount), but at the very least I think it should cost the service provider some measure of trust and thus create a preference towards providers that don’t do it.

In the case described, all of this is not that huge; my strong reaction was mainly to TFA going from “fair” pricing to price discrimination.

>> If you’ve put it in writing and not planning to sue over violations, you’re lying to me.

> You're basically advocating for a "zero context" policy around contracts, in which people don't have any choice whether to sue someone.

I put it in absolute terms myself, so I guess I deserve this a bit, but still, no, that’s not what I was trying to advocate. Note that the original article was talking about putting in a clause the service provider would not make the slightest effort to enforce or would even be completely unable to.

Consider the law example I also gave: it’s one thing to allow for some discretion from a prosecutor; it’s another for people to know that nobody was ever convicted of a crime that’s technically on the books. I understand this is a slippery slope argument and those are always suspect, but I think it’s fair to say that this kind of neglect for one piece of law does tend to spread to other parts of it, at least when people are doing it consciously and not because they’re unaware of legal arcana.

In contracts, the situation is somewhat better because the punishment is not that dire. It is also worse because usually the only explicit penalty is termination of service, so in essence you have a bunch of rules which are all nominally enforced the same way except the provider will enforce some of them and won’t enforce others, at its discretion. (Naturally, I also think that the very common arbitrary no-recourse termination clause is completely asininine. At the very least, I never feel safe to rely on a service that uses one.)

> You seem to be under the impression that if people didn't charge so much money, you'd have stuff cheaper. That's not true - what would actually happen is you'd just have less stuff, because people wouldn't build them in the first place.

You are to some extent right, of course. To some extent, though, some of my experiences with price discrimination (see above) tell me you’re also kind of wrong.

For example, I can’t recall an airline or railway that on transitioning from all refundable tickets to a split of non-refundable and refundable tickets ended up making non-refundable tickets measurably cheaper (in the long run) or pricing refundable ones in a way that’d correspond to any realistic fraction of refunds. Similarly, increasing limits on luggage never seem to make things any cheaper. That looks like price discrimination, not adjusting for costs or anything related to actual costs.

The SSO thing, as another example, looks the same to me, and even actual service operators in this forum have said that it actually is. Granted, I’ve heard horror stories about the integration and support costs, but if even a couple of operators settled on a single very strictly defined subset of SAML, OAuth or whatnot, saying it’s their way or the highway, the implementations and the integration consultants would likely come. It’s just that nobody has the incentive to, and systems remain insecure as a result.

> If someone can afford to create software and run it while charging far less than it's worth for your benefit, then wonderful, but it boggles my mind that you somehow think people owe you this service.

First off, TFA was advocating for eliminating (and settling for deemphasising) a class of service that was at the time manifestly cost-effective to operate (though could become less so after scaling up).

Second, to a degree, yeah, I’d actually be happier with a service that provides no free or severly subsidized options at all than with one that has a free option, then a huge cliff, then a heavy-profit-earner option.

If this means a world where there are no accessible services of that kind, sure, because except for very costly services such a world is unstable: at some point somebody will build an accessible alternative, as long as they are not pushed out by a subsidized free option. This applies to tech-oriented services first of all, although when the expertise gap between wanting and building is larger such situations do sometimes persist (CAD, CAT/TM, arguably photo editors).