Internet Economics IV

Abstract : The fourth edition of the seminar Internet Economics IV' deals with the use of Internet technology and additional ways to support and do business. Starting the talks, a view onto techniques of a public key infrastructure is presented. It is discussed with respect to its technology and its economic impacts in the Internet world today. The second talk addresses the area of AAA protocol, summarizing authentication. authorization, and accounting questions in the Internet. Since commercial services drive the need for security, the set of AAA services offered by AAA protocols form their basis. Service level Agreements (SLA) define a contractual relation between a service provider and a service user. The third talk addresses SLA in the Information Technology (IT) environment and outlines main aspects for communication services as well. Talk number four outlines an operational perspective of the Internet, looking at research networks as well as key technological issues in support of the multi-administration model applied. Autonomous systems, Internet addresses, lSPs and their tiers, as well as ,-anda,rdization organizations are discussed. On the application layer of todays Internet web services have been defined. The fifth talk summaxizes key aspects of XML (Extended Markup Language), Web Services and their components, and B2B/B2C aspects of those in a technical and economic snapshot. Talk number six discusses the trade-off between quality and cost, which outlining QoS (Quality-of-Service) aspects and over-provisioning views. This part summarizes for a comparison a number of known pricing models as well. The seventh talk focuses on reputation and trust as an underlying factor for distributed systems in support of partner-to-partner communications. Those key business-enabling prerequisites and mechanisms are defined, their main characteristics are outlined, and practical examples are presented.