Joe Provo wrote:
Interesting how this will play into Earthlink's "provider of the real internet" advertizing... is providing an inclusively inconsistant view of the namespace more real than doing so by exclusion? :-) Is an inconsistant namespace "worse" than transparent caching, or other "not real Internet" practices? Either way, it becomes a matter of end-user confusion. Personally, I think this will be the significant 'secession' from the current collective DNS tree that other attempts have not been.
Speaking as someone who used to work there... the best explanation we could ever come up with was that Earthlink really did want to be Pepsi to AOL's Coke (which works, seeing where they're based after the Mindspring merger). It can be summed up by the phrase "The biggest, and second-best". If you look at the amount of private, users-only (or "must do extra stuff to get it if you're not a user") services AOL has... is it any suprise that the second-biggest dialup ISP is completely willing to do the same sort of thing to get their users "access to more of the internet"? No, the Web isn't the Internet - but it's the cash cow that gives most of the folks on this list their jobs, if often indirectly. Who wants to take bets that the most-looked-up of their "new TLDs" is .xxx? Anyone? I could use the spare cash... -- *************************************************************************** Joel Baker System Administrator - lightbearer.com lucifer@lightbearer.com http://www.lightbearer.com/~lucifer