Economic FAQs About the Internet

The MIT Press eBooksPublished 5 May 1997

Jeffrey K. MacKie–Mason, Hal R. Varian

DOI10.7551/mitpress/3867.003.0006

Citations111

Abstract

This is a set of Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) about the economic, institutional, and technological structure of the Internet. We describe the history and current state of the Internet, discuss some of the pressing economic and regulatory problems, and speculate about future developments. What is a FAQ? FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions. There are dozens of FAQ documents on diverse topics available on the Internet, ranging from physics to scuba diving to how to contact the White House. They are produced and maintained by volunteers. This FAQ answers questions about the economics of the Internet (and towards the end offers some opinions and forecasts).

Keywords

Engineering

Communications of the ACMSecurity without identification: transaction systems to make big brother obsolete

1,650 Citations1985David Chaum

The large-scale automated transaction systems of the near future can be designed to protect the privacy and maintain the security of both individuals and organizations.

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IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in CommunicationsPricing congestible network resources

640 Citations1995Jeffrey K. MacKie–Mason, Hal R. Varian

The basic economic theory of pricing a congestible resource, such as an FTP server, a router, a Web site, etc, is described, and the implications of "congestion pricing" are examined as a way to encourage efficient use of network resources.

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IEEE/ACM Transactions on NetworkingPricing in computer networks: motivation, formulation, and example

466 Citations1993Ron Cocchi, Scott Shenker +2 more

The role of pricing policies in multiple service class networks is studied and it is found that it is possible to set the prices so that users of every application type are more satisfied with the combined cost and performance of a network with service-class-sensitive prices.

The ecology of computation

255 Citations2003Bernardo A. Huberman

The author has developed a perspective on computational ecologies as well as a theory of their behavior which explicitly takes into account incomplete knowledge and delayed information on the part of its agents.

NetCash

214 Citations1993Gennady Medvinsky, Clifford Neuman

This paper proposes an extension of access control to integrate licensing called Stateful Access Control and it addresses some aspects of virus protection.

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in CommunicationsBilling users and pricing for TCP

113 Citations1995R. Edell, Nick McKeown +1 more

It is indicated that pricing schemes may be used to control network congestion either by rescheduling time-insensitive traffic to a less expensive time of the day, or by smoothing packet transfers to reduce traffic peaks.

A study of priority pricing in multiple service class networks

89 Citations1991Ron Cocchi, Deborah Estrin +2 more

Price allow us to spread the benefits of multiple service classes around to all users, rather than just having these benefits remain exclusively with users who are performance sensitive.

Anonymous credit cards

76 Citations1994Steven H. Low, Sanjoy Kumar Paul +1 more

This paper describes a communications networking technique for funds transfer which combines the privacy of cash transactions with the security, record-keeping and charging mechanisms of credit cards.

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Service models and pricing policies for an integrated services Internet

65 Citations1995Scott Shenker

It is argued that an integrated services Internet, in order to be effective, must employ per-user, quality-of-service sensitive, and usage-based pricing policies.

Bandwidth Allocation By Pricing In ATM Networks

56 Citations1994John Murphy, Liam Murphy

Simulation results show the improvement possible with the scheme versus a leaky bucket method in terms of cell loss probability, and that a small queue with pricing can be e cient to multiplex heterogeneous sources.