[e2e] a means to an end

[David P. Reed]

 Re the likelihood of unification of routing to a single common routing 
system shared by all end users...  I offer the following news 
(unverified) reported by "jamie rishaw" <j at arpa.com <mailto:j at arpa.com>> 
on Farber's IP list today.

>   You may recall the event just a few months ago that alleged a 
> Pakistani "hijack" of the BGP route-advertisements leading to 
> Youtube..  the same is under way as I type this.
>
> :: Short Story / "Breaking News" ::
>
>   Hundreds to thousands of networks connected to the internet are 
> being threatened and "black holed" by what appears to be a failure of 
> trust in the policies implementing the Internet routing protocol BGP.

Maybe it *is* time for a few competing services that use the same 
address space to compete.   The non-hostility based analogy is USPS and 
the other national postal services, FedEx, UPS and DHL.   All undertake 
at retail (not only backbone) to deliver packages with the same address 
formats, and none has converged with another (though sometimes one 
provides part of the route for another - this is true of FedEx and the 
USPS, as one example, which cover for each other in different areas).

This has many con's as well as many pro's, of course.   If your monopoly 
local Internet access provider won't let you select the routing service 
but instead forces you to accept the one with which it has a "deal", you 
could find yourself held hostage by the monopolist.  All I can say to 
that is that it is not a problem with multiple routing services, it is a 
problem with monopolists and the governments who enable them to sustain 
their monopolies.