[ih] History of the Economics of the Internet?

[Greg Skinner]

On Jul 28, 2026, at 9:48 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 

Yep, there was an Internet Accounting IETF working group <https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/acct/about/>.  There is an archive <https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/acct/> available.  Also see Internet Accounting 2 <https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/acct2/about/>.

--gregbo