Sending vs requesting. Was: Re: Sprint / Cogent

Tue Nov 4 19:39:55 UTC 2008

On Saturday 01 November 2008 20:00:46 Matthew Petach wrote:
> Unfortunately, as I'm sure you're all too aware, for public companies, it's
> very hard to get away with saying "I was doing what was right for the
> Internet, not what would make my business the most money" at a
> shareholder meeting, or during an earning's call with Wall Street
> analysts; they tend to be very unforgiving of actions that aren't in
> line with the short-term profit-making goal, to the point where CEOs
> have been ousted and class-action lawsuits threatened when it
> seems the actions being taken weren't geared to optimize profits
> for the shareholders.

The next Great Compromise could be over multihoming of endusers (whether the 
enduser is a content consumer or a content provider is irrelevant; IP at 
Layer 3 is peer-to-peer anyway, between end systems).  After all, if 
providers are not willing to 'budge' a little 'for the good of the Internet' 
then why should endusers reduce or give up multihoming aspirations 'for the 
good of the Internet?'

After all, if access to the 'Internet' is a metric for making money, and money 
is being lost by access to content consumers being cut due to depeering 
events outside the enduser's control, then it makes business sense for an 
enduser to multihome, to bring connectivity events closer to the enduser's 
control.  Want to prevent multihoming exploding routing tables?  Prevent the 
desire to multihome by limiting 'partitioning' events.