Mike Tedd spoke about the need to charge for mature services, to manage the use of critical services, and suggested that charges should be related to perceived benefits, not to the cost of provision. See his notes . The internet is an experiment and it would be interesting to discover what people would be willing to pay for a better service. Although this seems little, a university with 2,000 terminals would compare this to the cost of a lecturer. Simon Crosby talked about experiments he is doing on on-line measurement to estimate resource usage and effective bandwidths.
Preliminary results are encouraging.
Ross Anderson talked about micro-payments and prepayment as mechanisms for charging. Zhang Wang wondered if we should only be charging for successful packets. See his notes on the meeting. Kevin Hoadly mentioned that we must respect the cultural aspects of the web. We need a flexible model, covering un-metered services and those that are charged and guaranteed a quality of service.