On Jul 18, 2014, at 11:32 , Jay Ashworth <j...@baylink.com> wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- >> From: "Owen DeLong" <o...@delong.com> > >> But the part that will really bend your mind is when you realize that >> there is no such thing as "THE Internet". > > "The Internet as "the largest equivalence class in the reflexive, transitive, > symmetric closure of the relationship 'can be reached by an IP packet from'" > -- Seth Breidbart. >
Note that the sentence is incomplete and as soon as you put something after "from" that is actually meaningful, you end up with different answers for the left hand side of that statement depending on what you put at the right hand side. Further, even that definition doesn't define a single cohesive entity and the definition of "can be reached by an IP packet" is highly variable and more subjective than you may realize. What we commonly refer to as "THE Internet" is really many different equivalence classes similar to what is described above, but each of them is made up of a collection of independently owned and operated networks that happen to cooperate on traffic delivery to varying extents and happen to have agreed to a common protocol and participate in some of the same management schemes for things like namespace collision avoidance and address distribution. Owen
