Combining Sender and Receiver Payments in the Internet

There have been a number of proposals for usage-sensitive payment schemes for the Internet. This chapter considers one aspect of payment for service in the Internet, the problem of allocating payment between the sender and the receivers of traffic. It proposes a scheme, called zone-based cost sharing, in which the sender and the receiver can pay some proportion of the cost for use of the Internet. The chapter proposes that any practical scheme must permit cost sharing among the participants, and also proposes that this sort of pricing should be applied only to enhanced services, such as real-time traffic or predictable capacity under congestion, rather than the basic packet transport service of the Internet.