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Re: peering wars revisited? PSI vs Exodus

  • From: Gordon Cook
  • Date: Tue Apr 04 00:33:25 2000


Hi Paul

1. I am doing what press is HERE to do. *INFORM*

2. I am sure you can figure out that this was sent to me by an affected party who wanted it leaked.

3. This concerns the ability of a publicly traded company to give its customers adequate service on the Internet.

4. Exodus certainly had to tell its content providers that they were gong to face problems in getting to somewhere between 5 and 10% of the Internet.

5. But Exodus was also embarrassed by the deterioration in its service that it was allowing to be inflicted on its customers. So Exodus, in an attempt to limit the damage, marked the email "customer confidential communication."

6. I am NOT an Exodus customer! And since I am press I have a personally reasonable obligation, should I choose to exercise it, to inform people that some important peering links have been broken.

7. Exodus has a problem. In marking that customer confidential it appears to me that it was trying to cover up its own problem and I imagine in doing so it was making some already upset customers further upset.

8. The sender of the message quite explicitly said I hope the press covers this. Therefore there was not a shred of doubt as to his intent.

In my opinion, if someone chooses to leak it to me, except for my relationship to the leaker, I have no obligation to exodus or anyone else. My default mode of operation has always been to keep the identity of the leaker CONFIDENTIAL. It is a subject of interest to me and I think to list readers. I have been around for a LONG time Paul, and while I must say that I respect you and your contributions to this industry, I also must say that here your accusations miss the mark.




At 10:15 PM 04/03/2000 -0400, Alex Rubenstein wrote:

> > >Because one party -- the originator -- marks an electronic communique as a
> > >confidential communication, does that really require the reciever to keep
> > >it confidential?
> >
> > Professional courtesy.
No,  I have no obligation of professional courtesy to exodus what so ever


>
>Hmm, I forgot to put the sentence in about 'how it would be ethical for
>people to honor it.'...

Fortunately, there are still quite a few folks who still honor
professional & personal ethics. Unfortunately, there are many
who do not.
Paul, sorry, you put this in entirely inappropriate clothing....see my points above.


- paul

A bit later Paul added

For the masses, now:

It is the forwarding of "private" or "confidential" e-mails that
I find offensive, not the information or content.

- paul

My apologies Paul for perhaps not making the provenance of the message CRYSTAL clear as I have tried to do above.

I was NOT a confidential message **TO ME**.

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