North American Network Operators Group

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Re: links on the blink (fwd)

  • From: Michael Dillon
  • Date: Sun Nov 05 00:14:04 1995

On Sat, 4 Nov 1995, Scott Bradner wrote:

> > > Well, I don't think I will need to be reminded not to buy Internet service
> > > from your organization.
> > 
> > Why not? We don't run the Internet, we just connect people to it.
> 
> As has been said about New Yorker cartoons, if you don't get it, no amount
> of explanation will help.

Give me one example of an ISP that will take responsibility for fixing a 
problem that is outside their control and is also outside the control of 
the companies with which they have contracted for service.

We can try to help other people fix their problems so our customers can 
get service, but "trying" is just about the limit. I have helped 
Compuserve fix email gateway problems, a small California college fix DNS 
problems, the Internic fix errors in the .com zone file, and so on. This 
is become I am a nice guy and have some ability to pinpoint the actual 
source of problems. But it is not a service that I promise to my 
customers or that I contract to perform.

In an anarchical webwork of relationships like the Internet, that is the 
best that anyone can do. To do differently would mean changing the entire 
paradigm upon which the global Internet is based. But if you do that you 
may just kill the goose that laid the golden egg because the commercial 
success of today's Internet is inextricably tangled with the pricing 
schemes used and those pricing schemes are in turn created by the network 
architecture.

Aside from more draconian network monitoring and control schemes to 
provide contractually guaranteed service levels, we could just solve the 
problems by adding twice as much bandwidth as we need. But then....
nature abhors a vacuum... and the video-on-demand folks are sitting on 
the sidelines drooling with their tongues hanging out...


Michael Dillon                                    Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc.                                 Fax: +1-604-542-4130
http://www.memra.com                             E-mail: [email protected]