> [Is this one of those innovation-inspiring aspects of The
> Market that Clare Spark was talking about?]
Ah yes, Clare Spark, never trust anybody that signs 'PhD' after their name on e-mail lists as though it give additional weight to their otherwise weightless words.
But yes, the cyber-libertarians figure the Market(tm) has worked because Clueless and Witless has backed down. The less religiously fanatic are warning that unless providers get their act together, Big Bad Government is gonna regulate them.
I was bitten by this myself. I have (for a little while longer) 3 T1's from PSI. It's too bad they are in Chapter 11 and unlikely to emerge intact because engineering-wise, they were once a very good company. Their management, however, leaves a bit to be desired. Some people are viewing this event as a karma kind of thing as just last fall, PSI pulled the same crap on a couple of their former peers (Above.Net and Exodus).
Let me try and explain what the flap is about. The Internet is not 'a thing' -- it is not *a* network, it is a collection of networks that are in various ways interconnected. A 'Tier-1' provider is a network that is "transit free", which means that they do not *buy* bandwidth from anyone, rather they have huge amounts of their own fiber running everywhere that they own. When they meet other similar sized networks at "peering points" where they exchange traffic, these peering arrangements are "settlement free", meaning no money changes hands as both companies agree that they get roughly equal benefits from exchanging traffic. Comapnies in this category are PSI,C&W, UU/WorldCom (the biggest beast of them all), Sprint, Genuity, etc. (Side note: C&W is the former MCI.net that MCI had to sell in order get regulatory approval to merge with WCOM -- then they turned around an bought UUnet, the bigest ISP on the planet. So much for regulation...)
Tier-2's have some fiber of their own, but also must buy transit from other providers in order to have global reach. There is a lot of dick-slinging about who's a tier-1 and who's a tier-2, as well as a lot of Marketing blather from ISP's that are definitly *not* tier-1, but the settlement-free defintion is most widely excepted by informed and rational people.
Now if C&W can convince itself that PSI has fallen from tier-1 status, then they can 'de-peer' them and insist that they buy transit from them instead. In reality, if PSI were forced to do this, they'd buy transit from anyone BUT C&W (Above and Exodus ended up buying transi from Verio and Sprint to get to PSI when PSI de-peered them.)
[Something's come up -- gotta go -- more later]
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Joseph Noonan Houston, TX jfn1 at msc.com