The internet, like any new technology, is still undergoing constant changes. Although the current pricing schemes are well established and widely implemented, these practices have several inherent flaws that in the near future, will make them either obsolete or unfair to the majority of users on the internet. Moreover, the internet is realizing new realms and is pushing new bounds everyday as a medium for communication. As the technology develops further and further, a new pricing scheme will need to be established to support the type and amount of data being sent over the net.

A significant concern on the internet today is the issue of congestion and bandwidth. The days of purely ASCII text based web sites are gone, and the days of multimedia are dominating the bulk portion of the internet. The difference between plain old ASCII and multimedia is dramatic. Ordinary ASCII text uses about 44 bits per word. Telephone-quality voice uses 21,000 bits per word, and stereo CD uses 466,000 bits per word. Network quality video without compression is about 100 megabits per second. With compression, it's about 45 Mbs-which is the entire capacity of the NSFNET backbone. Present-day video conferencing systems require about 400 Kbps. So clearly, the need for bandwidth is increasing with every web site created, especially as their complexity reaches new heights. As more users begin surfing the net for multimedia based pages, congestion will become an even bigger problem then it is today.

Another congestion factor comes from power users of the net such as major corporations. Currently, many large corporations are beginning to use the net as their primary form of communication in addition to the phone. These companies are using the net for everything from getting their company message across to customers and the public through a web site to sending extensive video conferences across the globe. With an average bandwidth requirement of 400Kbps for an average video conference, the restrictions of the NSFNET and the smaller branches will impose a great bottleneck with corporate communications streaming through the net on a daily basis. As these companies come to rely on the internet as their main form of communication, the amount of bandwidth available to other users will become less and less. Therefore, pricing schemes must change in order to more fairly charge those who use more bandwidth than another. Currently, major corporations use the internet relatively for free once they have the proper infrastructures put in place.

Finally, although bandwidth will cost effectively increase in the near future, any decrease in cost per amount of bandwidth will only attract more users. With that in mind, the forecasts for demand out pacing the availability of bandwidth is very high, even with the development of new technologies. Therefore, internet congestion will not easily be relieved.

Taking all these factors into account, the increase in multimedia content, corporate use of the internet, and the increase in demand of bandwidth, the current internet pricing scheme will have to change. Issues of fair use and who has the right to dominate internet space is already a debate in progress. New pricing proposals will hope to diminish some of these problems by creating a demand based approach. Essentially, these proposals hold that those who want to pay for a certain amount of bandwidth in a given period of time should receive priority based on a their utility function of whatever they are trying to access on the web.