Dynamic Charging for Information Services

The last five years has seen an incredibly rapid growth in the number of subscribers to the Internet and in the number of organisations which now consider a presence on the world wide web as vital to their commercial interests. With such growth arises the possibilities of not just advertising services on the WWW, but actually offering, delivering and gaining payment for information services over the Internet. Such information service providers may be the Internet provider themselves, or represent value added service providers making use of a third party Internet service provider. This paper looks at the issues which are relevant to devising charging schemes based on information content and usage. The paper first outlines some general approaches for charging for bandwidth and information services and then examines the properties of digital information which can effect the metering and charging of such information services. The paper presents the early ideas of a charging policy which discourages local (user) copies of digital information resources, suggesting two indexes which can be used to indicate the behaviour (usage) of the information. The paper also details the design and implementation of a generic (charging policy neutral) accounting management service based on the TINA C service architecture. This management service is being trialed on WWW based tele-educational service operating over a pan-European ATM based network. 2. Charging for bandwidth and information There are many possible forms of service charging that can be used by service providers. e.g. flat-fee (usage insensitive charging) usage based (usage sensitive charging), responsive charging. information sensitive (content-aware) charging and information insensitive (content-blind) charging. Flat-fee charging is perhaps the most basic charging mechanism that individuals and organisations use when paying for Internet access. This charging method has some incentives for usen and service providers. For users it yields a predictable charge with little difficulty in understanding the bill, whereas for service providers it provides a predictable income with little accounting overhead. It must also be noted that flat-fee charging doesn't penalise information sharing; this sharing referred to as " public-spirited behavior " , in [RFC 12721, provides the ethos for Internet usage and accounting. Unfortunately this scheme typically leads to heavy network usage because there is no penalty (other than the resultant network congestion) for users consuming high levels of bandwidth.