Today’s digital platform monopolies and oligopolies are a direct result of the lack of settlements in the internet (TCP-IP stack).
The internet could be “free” because of voice WAN competition in the US in the 1980s and government funding for “trusted” actors. Furthermore, the WAN competition resulted in the analog MAN providers (Baby Bells) moving to flat-rate dial-up to withstand the competitive onslaught of the digital competitors whose costs had dropped 99% in a decade.
Since data was the proverbial pimple on the voice Elephant’s behind, and the costs were so low, there was no need for settlements or capacity billing. The problem with the lack of settlements is 3 fold: 1) it puts most if not all the risk of a transaction or communication on the receiver, 2) it doesn’t afford centralized procurement or called party pays (such as 800 and VPN), and 3) it doesn’t enable real-time value conveyance from core to edge, top to bottom, larger to smaller, commercial to residential, urban to rural, etc…