“How are we going to pay for this? Fee-for-service in distributed systems-research and policy issues”

With the increasing array of information and services being supported by distributed computing, we face a new challenge: How do we handle charges? Providers of information will want to receive “royalties”, providers of computing services will want to receive payment for use of the service, and providers of the network will want to receive payment for the transmission. At some point, the users of the provided services will have to pay for this. What do we need to do in designing our distributed computing systems to support some form of charge/payment? This paper discusses these issues