[ih] History of the Economics of the Internet?

[Jack Haverty]

On 7/25/26 15:39, Ofer Inbar via Internet-history wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 18, 2026 at 12:51:04PM -0700,
> Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> Over the last decade or two, I've suggested, several times, to
>> several ISOC administrations, that ISOC "walk the walk" with email
>> by serving as a prominent example of "how to do email right".   That
>> of course might require policies to possibly be changed, technical
>> flaws to be addressed, educational efforts, and even perhaps
>> governments' actions.
>>
>> Most Internet users today likely experience things like phishing
>> attacks, emails with forged sources, and other such effects that
>> make email untrustworthy in their views.   Most of the Internet
>> users have no idea how to protect themselves from such attacks.
>>   Most regulatory and government authorities seem to have no idea
>> what, if anything, they can do about it.
> A majority of younger Internet users (at least in the English speaking
> world I'm familiar with) - perhaps not an overwhelming majority, but
> quite certainly a majority - simply do not use email to communicate.
> They use it to verify their address for accounts, they use it to check
> for a specific thing that they know is going to be sent to them by
> email and that they know they want to see, and most of the rest of the
> time, they let their email pile up and they ignore nearly all of it.
>
> To actually stay in touch with friends, family, coworkers, groups
> they're part of, etc. - all the things email used to be for - they
> use messaging apps.  Discord, Facebook, Slack Instagram, and more
> like that.  Or SMS/RCS phone texts.
>
> All of the various problems with email today, including the ones you
> listed, are I think dwarfed by one big one that has caused this:
> spam.  This includes both scattershot scam-oriented spam, but also
> lots of lists that sign you up without asking permission.  You donate
> to a political candidate, and some sleazy "grassroots" database starts
> selling your address to loads of other campaigns of the same party.
> You pay for a meal at a restaurant with your phone, enter the email
> address for your receipt, and now not only are you on the email list
> for that restaurant, but also the next cafe or ice cream place or
> whatever where the payment system recognizes your card and offers
> to email your receipt and you didn't notice the small checkbox to
> opt out of signing up.  You RSVP to an event on some sleazy site like
> eventbrite, and now you're on several mailing lists for similar events.
>
> The majority of email is assumed to be spam or otherwise irrelevant,
> by people whose experience of email started after the explosion of
> spam that I described above.  They never knew what it was like for
> email to be relevant and worth checking, so they don't think of it
> as relevant or worth checking.  Knowing this, they also don't think
> it's a useful way to communicate with anyone they know.
>    -- Cos

You're absolutely right.  The email world has fragmented into a gaggle 
of separate "messaging" services.  In the beginning, email was a 
universal service, and even "being on the 'net" meant that you had an 
ARPANET email address.  Even when other mail services were in use, e.g., 
UUCP or even MCIMail, there were sometimes arcane ways to interoperate, 
using %, !, and the like to glue two messaging worlds together.   Today, 
there are lots of ways for people to communicate, and I've found few 
ways to make them work together.   The history of that evolution might 
be an interesting topic for some historian.

Spam is certainly an issue.  For history's benefit, spam was well known 
as an issue even in the early 1970s when email started on the ARPANET.  
Licklider at MIT pointed out (to me at least while we were implementing 
email) that every system needs some kind of "negative feedback" to be 
stable.   Engineers know this, whether they're building electronic stuff 
or steam engines a century ago.

Use of some resource, such as email, must have some "cost" associated 
with its use, to prevent rampant overuse.   We actually tried to 
introduce the notion of "stamps" to the develolping email standards in 
the 1970s to provide a form of negative feedback.  Even just a limit on 
the number of emails that one address could send over some time period 
would exert back pressure.

All such proposals were soundly rejected by the research community.  So 
no backpressure scheme was created and today it costs virtually nothing 
to send out hundreds or thousands of emails.   So corporations, 
politicians, charities, and entrepreneurs send them. Same with 
advertising, which does have a cost to the advertiser but little cost to 
the company injecting ads into web pages.  Most of such stuff would be 
considered spam by the recipients, to be scrolled past as quickly as you 
can.

This is all just one part of a larger History of Internet Economics, and 
it goes far beyond just email.  Yesterday I saw an article about the 
"dead internet theory" which characterizes the recent emergence of AI 
agents as disrupting the economics of the Internet as we've known it.  
See 
https://www.fastcompany.com/91579817/dead-internet-theory-is-real-web-agents 
if you're interested.   The economics of the Internet are now breaking 
again and no one knows what comes next.

For example, I recall hearing presentations at some conference in the 
early 1990s about "micropayments" and the technical ideas and progress 
which were currently being tested.  Yet today, we are all barraged with 
content that we can't access unless we subscribe to something.  Everyone 
wants a subscription and the continuous revenue stream it would bring - 
similar to the "all you can eat" philosophy sometimes used by 
restaurants if only for special events. Micropayments were touted as 
alternatives to subscriptions, so an Internet user could pay for one 
"meal" (article) at a time instead of committing to weeks or months of 
all-you-can-eat content.

What happened to micropayments?

Any economists out there?  Perhaps someone can relate the history and 
timeline of how the Internet Economy has evolved over the decades?   Is 
The Internet dying?

/Jack Haverty



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