[8676] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: NAP philosophy & IP technology
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter S. Ford)
Tue Nov 30 15:07:01 1993
From: "Peter S. Ford" <peter@goshawk.lanl.gov>
To: Lixia Zhang <lixia@parc.xerox.com>
Cc: yakov@watson.ibm.com, fair@apple.com, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 30 Nov 93 11:37:49 -0800.
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 93 13:05:31 MST
It really does not matter if there is 100 or 1 countries(y). There is no
reason for there to be a limit on the number of transit providers.
As Erik has pointed out, they will have to know a large number of
routes, but this does not seem to be too great an impediment today. It
is a small barrier to entry into the transit market since most people
buy off the shelf routers and they are available to all comers.
Monopoly provisioning of transit (backbone) is a belief that the simplest
solution should be the solution. Clearly life would be simpler by
some measure of simple if there was a single backbone. This is not
going to happen due to competitive pressures (there is a rumour that
you can make money providing Internet services!) and the problems of
building a single global system (as Yakov points out). The fact that
transit NSPs can function by carrying full/global routing information
allows us something other than the monopoly solution.
peter
