Re: Internic address allocation policy

[Finger in the Infodike <haas () ski utah edu>]

Very interesting debate... let's look back in time to the turn of the
century, when our fair city had several competing phone companies.
The largest, AT&T, drove the rest out of business by refusing to
connect to them.  Hence they became a monopoly and claimed that it
was "natural" for the phone company to be a monopoly.  The "natural
monopoly" lasted until fairly recently, when the government broke it
up.

I think that the Internet could well face the same set of issues.
In particular if, say MCInet became convincingly dominant, they could
easily put the rest of you guys out of business by refusing to connect
you.  I think that the only thing that can prevent the Internet following
the same course as the telephone network is government anti-trust
regulation, which I would hope to see, since I value free competition.

-- Walt
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