[ih] History of the Economics of the Internet?

[Brian E Carpenter]

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 <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