[ih] History of the Economics of the Internet?

[Jack Haverty]

Sorry, it's just something I remember.  No references that I know 
about.  The 1970s were a time when email was the new toy and it was used 
for everything that used to be done by letters or journal and conference 
papers.  Most of that early 1970s email has probably not survived (I 
have none of mine), except for some popular mailing lists of the era 
such as HEADER-PEOPLE.

As I recall, most of the debate was between Lick and whoever was at ARPA 
in the early 1970s.   Lick's vision was broad and deep, envisioning a 
future "intergalactic network" where computers were somehow able to 
communicate with each other to help humans do everything humans do - 
like communicating by email.

In contrast, ARPA was understandably focussed on the new ARPANET they 
had just built.   At the time, users of the ARPANET were restricted to 
people who were working on some ARPA project.  That restriction provided 
a form of backpressure to prevent widespread spam.   So other mechanisms 
such as "stamps" were deemed unnecessary.  Backpressure dosn't have to 
be monetary.

Lick's vision was anticipating the rise of The Internet where spam has 
become a real issue.   ARPA had a much shorter vision which didn't need 
such mechanisms.

Some economic issues were introduced when NSF entered the Internet 
project later in the 1980s.  NSF funded startup ISPs, but explicitly 
made it clear that each had to become self-sufficient in a short time 
(perhaps 2 years?  I forget...)

While I was later doing Internet projects at BBN in the 1980s, I asked 
one of the people reporting to me (Cyndi Mills) to start up a research 
topic (may have been an IETF working group?) focussed on Accounting for 
the Internet.   If we could gather data about usage of the Internet, 
that would be a precursor to introducing some kind of payments for 
usage.  That effort didn't get much interest either.

I guess there weren't enough economists in the research community.  I 
wasn't an economist, but I did take several undergraduate courses in 
Economics so I at least knew the basics.

/Jack Haverty

On 7/28/26 17:24, Dave Crocker wrote:
> On 7/28/2026 1:39 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>> We actually tried to introduce the notion of "stamps" to the 
>> develolping email standards in the 1970s to provide a form of 
>> negative feedback. 
>
>
> I don't recall this.  Especially since the first (and I believe only) 
> spam in the 1970s, was the DEC one in 1978.
>
> Can you provide any details (or even better a citation)?
>
> As for schemes to try to prevent or counter email abuse, there have 
> been enough over the years to prompt Cory Doctorow, many years ago, to 
> create a template for responding to such proposals.  I think it was 
> intended for humor, but he did such a good job, some of us have used 
> it seriously:
>
>     http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
>
> d/
>
> -- 
> Dave Crocker
>
> dhc at dcrocker.net
> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
> +1.408.329.0791
>
> Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter
> Northern California Coastal Region
> Information & Planning Coordinator
> American Red Cross
> dave.crocker2 at redcross.org

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