lpq's Journal: Amazon's route 53?

When I first saw this service offering, I had visions of this being a first step toward the offering of a private 'tollroad' to get to amazon's services (or your services hosted by amazon) that would enable customers using the tollroad to get faster speeds than over the 'public' interstate system. Not exact what it is, but that discursed into two separate chains of thought.

The first being a 'Brazil' (movie) future where internet denizens would have to have 'interstate-net' maps to determine their route to their destinations and see if there happened to be a toll-road, by-pass, running near their intended route that by detouring through, they might get faster speed for that leg of the journey at some increased cost, and how with real-time traffic updates, the efficacy of such routes could be computed in real-time to allow the net-traveler to navigate even local 'rush-hour' traffic zones with ease, though wondering how often one would find one's self on some isolated section of highway going at 100KB/s through a construction zone and thinking about the politicians always scamming for more money to build more freeways and bypasses that never seemed to actually alleviate congestion...Ug....headache and nausea terminated that line of thinking...

Then I read what Amazon's service was actually about -- it was just for DNS queries. While their upfront rates are very cheap, their backend, per-query costs are scary. They *sound* cheap, until you realize that a DoS attack against your DNS routers might leave you with a surprise bill that is far out of the range of your expectations.
Such 'pay-for-traffic' amount systems, right away show some of their worst flaws.
How many of the pay-for-traffic proponents are willing to swallow any fraud costs or inexplicable spikes in usage to their customers?
Sounds like yet another way that model to fail.
You can't charge customers for something they can't control. Even if you allow customers to specify 'cut-off' points, it's all too easy under such a system for 'malites' wishing to do harm to a site to overload it's cut-off points and get them taken off line or cost them a pretty penny -- by the DNS lookup. What a horrible system!