Pricing the Internet

This is a paper about pricing the Internet. The focus is the use of pricing for usage of the infrastructure for transmitting and receiving IP packets, rather than of services such as WWW, FTP, Archie, Gopher, etc. In this we propose subscription based pricing, and a mechanism based on dynamic host address allocation drawn from a set of separately routed addresses to give priority levels. The idea of subscriptions here is not that all service pricing should be achieved through subscriptions per se. They are seen as a way of policing priority access to service bottlenecks, and thus can be deployed incrementally at weak interconnection points in a network, or between ISPs. Users of these subscriptions could easily be entire organisations (represented by network numbers, or CIDRized collections of network numbers, or ASs and so on). These organisations could employ refinement techniques to provide more usage oriented charging if needed