Number 199 (Story #3), October 19, 1994 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein INTERNET TRAFFIC FOR THE 1984-1994 DECADE amounted to 3 x 10**14 bytes, half of that coming in the past year alone. To better accommodate future needs, the principal conduit for this flood of data, the National Science Foundation network, has just been restructured. According to Glenn Ricart of the University of Maryland, a number of changes in Internet traffic will result: (1) The price charged by the NSF network for participating institutions will go up but, because of the economy of scale, the expected price per usage should remain about the same. (2) Large institutions will probably still continue to pay for service at a flat rate but others may soon be billed by the byte. (3) Some institutions which formerly offered network access to individuals outside their immediate user group as a public service are now contracting or eliminating these services. Hereafter these popular services might be underwritten by corporate sponsorship (like public television) or made available through subscription. Ricart believes the impact of these changes will be small at first but will increase through the years: "The new Internet will not be free, but it is likely to get your dollars or ECUs faster by attracting them than by extracting them." (Computers in Physics, Sep/Oct 1994.)