[ih] History of the Economics of the Internet?

[Greg Skinner]

On Jul 29, 2026, at 9:20 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Somewhat related (and also related to my question about BGP4 and carrier
> economics), I posted "Metrics for Internet settlements" [1] in 1996, and was
> taken out for lunch at the next IETF by a couple of ISP heavy-hitters, one
> of whom was John Curran, to explain to me in no uncertain terms that if I
> ever brought this draft up in an IETF session, they would conspicuously leave
> the room on account of the Sherman Act. I thought they were over-reacting,
> but this was clearly an aspect they were worried about.
> 
> Apart from the complexity and overhead of detailed accounting, I suspect
> that avoiding anti-trust pitfalls also helped to lock in flat rate charging,
> as well as the BGP4 peering model.
> 
> [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-carpenter-metrics-00
> 
>   Brian
> 


I only have time for a short reply, but I noticed that two of the authors cited in [RTFM] from this draft are Cyndi Mills and Greg Ruth, the acct wg chairs.  That draft eventually became RFC 2063.  A Realtime Traffic Flow Measurement wg <https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/rtfm/about/> was formed.  There’s only what looks to be spam in the rtfm IETF mailarchive, but there is some rtfm wg discussion in its ietf-ftp directory <https://www.ietf.org/ietf-ftp/ietf-mail-archive/rtfm/>.  From quickly scanning the IP Flow Information Export mail archive <https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/ipfix/>, It looks like some accounting work continued in that wg.

--gregbo