[ih] History of the Economics of the Internet?

[Scott Bradner]

the BOF came out of the observation that addresses (IPb4 anyway) were going
to be "sold" and the question was - can addresses be sold while still trying
to not explode the routing table

it was a fun BOF (physical tokens distributed to the attendees (tossed that is) 
with the aim to collect them into collections)

Scott  (AD for that BOF)

> On Aug 4, 2026, at 8:32 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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
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