Cogent/Level 3 depeering

Fri Oct 7 02:37:14 UTC 2005

On 6-Oct-2005, at 19:38, Schliesser, Benson wrote:

> Customers don't want to pay for a "stochastic set of relationships",
> they will pay for the "Internet" however.

What is "Internet"? Let's channel Seth Breidbart briefly and call it  
the largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive symmetric  
closure of the relationship "can be reached by an IP packet from". It  
should be clear that the nature and extent of this network depends  
very much on the perspective of the connected device from which is it  
measured.

> It's like paying for a telephone that could only call a subset of the
> world's telephone users.

... which is precisely what every telephone service you can buy in  
the world gives you, to varying degrees.

Do people in Spain complain that they can't call numbers starting  
with +350, and insist on getting money back from their monthly bill?  
Or do they accept that their government has an ongoing dispute with  
the UK over whether Gibraltar is in fact part of Spain?

Joe