Not that I agree at all with AGIS's new stance on peering and market domination but we have to understand that the "friendly" Internet has long since past. [..other good points elided..]
Maybe I am the only person in a position like the one I'm in, and/or maybe I'm incredibly naive. But the Internet escaped from the lab while we were all collectively still making up our minds what it was or should be. Now there are billions of dollars invested in it and more billions being made from it -- and that's a good thing in principle since the world clearly did need something like the Internet and I'm glad they didn't end up with ISO or Appletalk or IPX or XNS or DECnet or SNA. (Not that any of those could have gotten us even this far, but I'm off my topic with that.) We all *need* the cooperation of people who at some level are competitors. As we're discovering by means of http://www.vix.com/spam/, a lot of folks are willing to endure complaints from their customers about less-than-full connectivity rather than endure other, louder complaints about mailboxes and newsgroups full of garbage. And, when we all collectively decide to field test the latest greatest Cisco download, we get _nowhere_ if we find and execute workarounds in our own net while letting our "competitors" burn. Some problems require "competing" NOCs to share "private" information without benefit of an NDA in order to get a cross-AS problem solved. It's always been clear to us that we'd have to steal eachother's customers and market aggressively (even if it means slamming a competitor) and all the "business as usual" tactics that mankind has honed over its thousands of years of commercial experience. And it's always been clear that at some deeper and more technical level, we had all better pull together or we won't have any peers (either because they can't stay up long enough, or because they don't trust us -- the result is the same). I didn't go to NANOG this time so I didn't hear what Peter said. If it was in the spirit of "we'll gradually take all your customers and put you out of business", I would have said this was unlikely and a little impolite but not out of character (sorry, Peter, but it's Zeus's honest truth). If on the other hand it was in the spirit of "our NOC isn't going to talk to your NOC any more, and we won't help you track down folks who SYN-bomb you via us, and we may just SYN-bomb you ourselves" then I must be missing one hell of a NANOG.