[ih] History of the Economics of the Internet?

[Greg Skinner]

On Jul 28, 2026, at 5:35 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> 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