Innovation in network pricing [Guest Editorial]

Networking researchers have long predicted the need for new pricing mechanisms for networks since the early days of the commercial Internet. In 1997, David Clark wrote: "In the future it will be desirable to provide additional explicit mechanisms to allow users to specify different service needs, with the presumption that they will be differentially priced." In 1999, Pravin Variaya, Principal Investigator of the Berkeley INDEX project, made a similar observation: "Although flat-rate continues to be the predominant form in which Internet access is sold, that form of pricing is unviable."