Michael Sondow wrote:
> Oh, I didn't mean free in the monetary sense. I meant free in the
> sense that all networks were equal, had equal access, were equally
> connected to all others. Isn't that so? Whereas now there is a
> hierarchy of networks: my ISP is a subnet of his upstream provider,
> which may be a subnet of verio.net, etc.
While it's true that all networks were created equal, there was still
a hierarchy for the most part. There were core networks and stub
networks. Things worked in general because there weren't a lot of
networks.
When the ARPANET went away and all of the regionals started to come
online, the multiplicity of networks caused routing problems. The
solution that we have now was the best compromise that was thought of
at the time. I'll note that these issues were debated as far back as
1993 (possibly earlier -- I don't remember), and there was susbantial
concern that the choices would put the smaller ISPs at the mercy of
the larger providers and regionals. You can read all about it in the
IETF archives from 1993 at ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive/ietf.
--gregbo
