clarity

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Wed Apr 27 11:12:57 UTC 2005



--On Wednesday, April 27, 2005 3:50 -0700 "william(at)elan.net" 
<william at elan.net> wrote:

>
> On Wed, 27 Apr 2005, Owen DeLong wrote:
>
>> Yes, most water transit companies are also the water supply company,
>
> Water supply comes from rivers, lakes, etc. While water company take
> water from those sources, they do not produce it and just take what they
> can get, clean it up and then deliver around the city.
>
In many places, the company that obtains and filters the water from these
various sources and the company that delivers it to end users are different
companies.  That is what my analogy speaks of.  An example would be Palo
Alto, California.  The City of San Francisco obtains and processes the
water from Hetch Hetchi and other sources.  They then sell it to the city
of Palo Alto which maintains it's own pumping resources and pipelines
to deliver to the end users.

In this case, the city of Palo Alto is analogous to the ISP.  The city
of San Francisco is analogous to the end node.

>> but, in my analogy, and, in some areas, as a matter of fact, they are
>> not the same. The chemical tampering of which you speak is done by the
>> water supply company at the supply point before it is put in the pipes
>> for transit to the end user.
>
> I've heard that Israel is considering (or buying already?) water from
> Turkey. Do you really think they are going to just deliver it as is
> or do you think the water company will clean it up on the local level
> before delivering it to the homes?
>
That depends, I guess, on the quality of water that Turkey delivers and
the SLA that Israel expects.  An example of what the situation I describe
is above, and, it is real.

> And BTW - you do realize "contamination" on the Internet usually at the
> source, right?
>
Right... Exactly my point.  Solving source point contamination in the
transit network isn't a good idea.

>> The water delivery company runs said pipes, and, my expectation from them
>> is that they deliver what they got from the water supply company without
>> any additional contaminants.
>
> If the water supply was contaminated, I'd fully expect water delivery
> company to clean it up before delivering to me.
>
In many cases, the water delivery company has no ability or facility to
do so.  I expect them to deliver clean water.  Frankly, I don't care
too much whether they act as a supply company or a delivery company,
so long as they deliver clean water.

My point was that it is perfectly acceptable for a delivery only company
to deliver without additives or filtration.  Sure, in the case of water,
since the delivery company is choosing the source point, they have some
additional responsibilities with regard to the source quality, but,
that isn't the case in the internet.  The end user is choosing the
source, and, the ISP is a pure delivery company.

>> Think of the web hoster as a water supply company.  The household user
>> is an end user.  The ISP is merely a pipeline.
>
> In any case, I don't think this is quite the correct analogy.
>
Any analogy will break if you pick at it hard enough.

> Water company usually delivers from just one (ok, maybe not one for
> larger areas but its in lower tens order) source and have typically
> control (directly or indirectly with signed agreement) over the source.
>
Yes.

> If you want to compare this to ISP, it would be like me having peering
> agreement and direct connection with few dozen content providers
> and only giving access to users to those few dozen websites.


Perhaps I should have used electric companies as a better example.

Owen

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