When was the last time you looked at http://www.gip.org ? Here's a quote from "Internet Foundations: Breaking Technology Bottlenecks": It is to achieve these goals that the Global Internet Project (GIP) - a voluntary, international organization of primarily Internet software, hardware and service providers and telecommunications industry CEOs and senior executives - presents this paper. It aims to identify a set of potentially crippling bottlenecks and offer forward-looking recommendations on how to eliminate or minimize such barriers to sustainable Internet growth. ... The Internet's development to date has been as haphazard as it has been delightful, more a function of random entrepreneurial initiative than of mature planning. The time has come to balance entrepreneurial spirit with sophisticated planning, within the largely voluntary framework that always has characterized Internet growth. ... Toward that end, GIP recommends the convening of a summit, ideally late in 1998 or early in 1999, to explore the foundations of future Internet development. The summit would be international in scope, bringing together key Internet players, at the most senior levels, from both the private and nonprofit sectors to consider opportunities and bottlenecks in the four key areas discussed in this paper - end-user software and hardware, high speed access, backbone networks, and server capabilities. ... Backbone Networks Recommendations * Providers of backbone networks should be able to interconnect with other backbone providers under reasonable terms in a competitive market environment. * Industry should evolve to schemes where services at different grades carry their own costs, dictated by the market. To read the whole paper check out http://www.gip.org/gip10.htm but please do explore the rest of the website as well. -- Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Communications Inc. - E-mail: michael@memra.com Check the website for my Internet World articles - http://www.memra.com