From time to time there is noise about billing for information transfer on the internet. Historically, it cost more to do the billing calculations
then it was worth, yet you still hear about people wanting to figure out how. One way would be to perform cooperative billing balances between nodes, and allow each node to 'bill upward'. This means that any two machines are more interested in their relative balance than how much money they are really spending. There are some interesting problems of trust and reliability, that might be solved through the use of digital money. Then there is the wiley programmer (or machine) that applies expert solutions to the problem trying to 'route' around billing imbalances. With sophisticated enough algorithms such machines would be basically trading on billing futures, perhaps demonstrating that computers could be better capitalists than people. Imagine a communications network that collapses because of an economic crash. Would the internet require the equivalent of suspension of programmed trading (routing) and a FTC?