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).
