[ih] Fwd: History of "accounts"

[johnl at iecc.com (John Levine)]

>I don't think the absence of a bean-counting-bit impeded the growth of 
>the internet, or the remuneration of those who built the infrastructure 
>to enable it. In fact, I'd say that *at the level of IP and TCP*, the 
>ideology of the shared-information sorts actually enabled a network 
>that could be billed at connection- and application-levels.

That certainly seems right to me.  Trying to account a packet at a
time would have been a huge distraction from getting useful work done.