It would be very amusing to watch the Sprint folks run around NANOG trying to get back the few peering agreements they had because the agreements terminated because the company was sold. After watching what happened with the InternetMCI spin-off, I wouldn't be surprised the DOJ is watching how "transfers" happen. Will Sprint still be a "tier 1" provider?
Its amazing the net works at all.
The reality is I think it would be very unusual if UUNET terminated Genuity's or Sprint's peering agreement just because the ownership changed. If UUNET wouldn't do it in the case of those cases, they would have a difficult time explaining to DOJ why they would terminated a different provider's peering agreement if its ownership changed.
I don't think that would really be much of an issue in the case of wcom/uunet and sprint getting together. I'm betting that they already have most "notable" peers in common. And if not, chances are that UUNet would have some sprint does not. The only real issue is going to be instances where one has a peering arrangement with a network that the other is transiting. And that, of course, is a case by case issue. Its been my observation that in mergers/acquisitions/etc that most peering arrangements will transfer. Each gets evaluated by both the companies merging and the peers, of course, but I haven't witnessed a large amount of problems in that regard. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Wayne Bouchard [Immagine Your ] web@typo.org [Company Name Here] Network Engineer http://www.typo.org/~web/resume.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------