Re: History of the Economics of the Internet?

The piara BOF was at IETF 36 in June 1996 (Montreal), but no minutes were posted. The only concrete traces are at the URLs below.

However, I can tell you that there was considerable angst within the IAB and IESG about the antitrust aspect and a strong view from several IESG members that such discussions had no place in the IETF. I can't be more specific. I have a handful of emails about this from July and August 1996 but I feel that they are still confidential, under the IAB and IESG customs of that time.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-bellovin-piara-framework-00
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-li-piara-cost-model-00
https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/36/area.and.wg.reports/ops/piara-slides-96jun.ppt

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 05-Aug-26 10:18, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote:
> On Jul 28, 2026, at 5:35 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> I think there are some really interesting economic questions, such as:
>>
>> - why did advertising, and charging for domain names, become major factors in Internet economics?
>> - how has the design of BGP4 affected carrier economics (competition vs collaboration)?
>> - why did flat-rate charging become the dominant model for ISPs?
>> - what fractions of application layer revenue come from advertising, subscriptions, pay-per-view, etc?
>> - why does anyone trust cryptocurrency?
>> - how will AI change Internet economics?
>>
>> I think email and spam are actually minor, economically speaking.
>>
>> Regards/Ngā mihi
>>    Brian Carpenter
>>
> 
> While looking for something else, I found references to the piara BOF <https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/piara/about/>.  I had forgotten about it.  A few writings may be of interest:
> 
> Towards a Cost Model for Routing and Addressing <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-li-piara-cost-model/>
> Financial Incentives for Route Aggregation and Efficient Address Utilization in the Internet: A Framework <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-bellovin-piara-framework/>
> Financial Incentives for Route Aggregation and Efficient Address Utilization in the Internet <https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/piara/>
> 
> --gregbo
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