Yuck. I was interviewed by the GAO a few months back (they wanted to talk to little players about the transit market) and was worrying that the feds wanted to mandate interconnection policies in one form or another ... we certainly don't want to encourage that kind of behavior. However, it seems reasonable that if we can't regulate ourselves someone else is going to do it for us.
It seems that everyone has fogotton what the "Internet" is. The Internet is not IP, the network protocol could change and it would still be the Internet. The Internet is not the providers, the providers could change and it would still be the Internet. The Internet is a spirit and a philosophy. That spirit and philosophy is of making a good faith effort to obtain connectivity and exchange information with anybody else who makes a similar effort. Anyone who claims to provide 'Internet access' or 'Internet service' or to be an 'Internet' product or service without practicing that philosophy is, in my opinion, practicing fraud. This applies to software, hardware, and even peering. A program is "Internet software" if it makes a good faith effort to exchange information with anybody else who makes a similar effort, not if it happens to work over the machines and protocols that happen to constitute the Internet today. DS