The Evolving Internet: Technology, Regulation and Pricing

Abstract

This chapter covers the evolution of the Internet in its historic setting, the emergence of Internet institutions, technologies, architectures and services. From this an Internet industry developed as taking major dominance in the telecommunications world expanding to a global context. Key economic issues involve Internet pricing, Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning, congestion management, Internet regulation and the backbone network technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) in view of traffic management and congestion control. The relation between service discipline and the varieties of the bandwidth-buffer tradeoff is also discussed. It shows improvements being made to effectively operate and manage networks that may support performance and guarantees in serving heterogeneous users with a wide range of requirements.

Keywords: Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Bandwidth-Buffer, Burstiness, Competitive Bidding, Congestion Control, Internet Protocol (IP), Internet Pricing, Internet Service Provider (ISP), Price Elasticities, Resource Allocation Algorithm, Quality of Service (QoS), Standardization, Service Discipline, Service Level Arrangement (SLA), Telephony Model, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Virtual Channel, Voice over IP (VOIP).