Re: History of the Economics of the Internet?

Jack Haverty via Internet-history <[email protected]> Wed, 5 Aug 2026 12:20:30 -0700

Newsgroups	gmane.culture.internet.history
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

I've learned a bit about the Economics history from these discussions.  
  For example, it seems that even the economic structure of agreements 
between ISPs is not at all uniform.  Most of the stories I've heard 
concern interconnections of ISPs in the US and perhaps some parts of 
EU.  Is this representative of other parts of the world?  Has it changed 
over time as ISPs emerge in an area, grow, and compete (or don't)?  Have 
different governments influenced the economics by laws or regulations?  
  When borders are crossed, are there treaties involved?

The history of the IETF is fairly well documented in archives.  But 
there's a long path from IETF discussions or published Standards to 
actual operational experience in the live Internet.  How have ideas, 
concepts, protocols, and such economic mechanisms migrated into the 
operational Internet?   When the IETF "puts something on the shelf for 
anyone to use", what has happened over the last 40 years as the Internet 
has turned into the communications infrastructure for the world?

Personally, I agree with Brian's list of interesting questions about the 
Economics.  I also think that some problems we see today, such as email 
spam, might be someday traced back to a flaw in the economic model which 
has evolved for the Internet.

When the Internet was first being built, ARPA (later also NSF) was 
paying for everything.  We didn't have to think about Economics.  The 
Internet was just an Experiment, which would inform the development of 
the "real" system of OSI.  We worried a lot about efficiency, but never 
about economics.   OSI would take care of that.

We were very very wrong in that vision.....

/Jack Haverty

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